ery,
was perfectly intelligible, and throbbed with a certain sonority like
that of distant gongs; but no sane man would have written it in his
waking moments. In that fact lay its charm. The author's voice,
naturally low and musical, acquired new tones as he recited it, giving
to it the qualities of an incantation; and round us, as though fashioned
out of shadows, was the large, dimly lighted drawing-room, which the old
novelist had incrusted with impossible heraldries, culminating in
escutcheons of pre-Christian Welsh kings.

The pseudo-Gothic revival, of which Knebworth is a late monument, but
which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole in the stucco of Strawberry
Hill, is, if judged by the strict canons of architectural taste, absurd,
but as time goes on and the taste which produced it vanishes the houses
in which it embodied itself cease to be mere absurdities. They acquire
the rank and dignity of historical documents. They are more than mere
architecture. They represent attempts at a reconstruction of life--a new
fusion of politics with poetry, romance, and mysticism. Their fault is
that this fusion has failed to become actual. And yet these attempts,
though largely recorded in stucco, still evoke visions and atmospheres
from which many of us are loath to be driven into the wintry actualities
of to-day.

For myself, on my return from Hungary, the influence of romance was
further protracted by the fact that I for some time was occupied in
completing my work on Cyprus; but when this at last had received its
finishing touches there was nothing left that could keep other interests
at bay. Radical and Socialist oratory was resounding on every side.
Doctrines with regard to Labor were again being promulgated in forms so
extreme that they reached the verge of delirium, and were yet received
with acclamations. Old statistical errors, for the complete refutation
of which unimpeachable evidence abounded, were shouted afresh, as though
they were not open to question. But in respect of all facts and
principles which lie really at the basis of things, the Conservative
party was, as a whole, dumb.

I began to say to myself daily, "_Semper ego auditor tantum? Nunquam ne
reponam?_" "Will no one wake up this unhappily lethargic mass, and by
forcing the weapons of knowledge and reason into their hands provoke
them and enable them to meet the enemy at the gate?" Every other
interest, philosophic, romantic, religious, fell away from me