oo mighty a Goliath for the present in any conceivable
ambition even of a fast-growing David. My earlier apprehension, fed at
the season as from a thousand outstretched silver spoons--for these all
shone to me with that effect of the handsomest hospitality--piled up the
monster to such a height that I could somehow only fear him as much as I
admired and that his proportions in fact reached away quite beyond my
expectation. He was always the great figure of London, and I was for no
small time, as the years followed, to be kept at my awe-struck distance
for taking him on that sort of trust: I had crept about his ankles, I
had glanced adventurously up at his knees, and wasn't the moral for the
most part the mere question of whether I should ever be big enough to so
much as guess where he stopped?

Odd enough was it, I make out, that I was to feel no wonder of that kind
or degree play in the coming time over such other social aspects, such
superficially more colourable scenes as I paid, in repetition as
frequent as possible, my respects and my compliments to: they might meet
me with wreathed smiles and splendid promises and deep divinations of
my own desire, a thousand graces and gages, in fine, that I couldn't
pretend to have picked up within the circle, however experimentally
widened, of which Half-Moon Street was the centre, and nothing therefore
could have exceeded the splendour of these successive and multiplied
assurances. What it none the less infinitely beguiles me to recognise
to-day is that such exhibitions, for all their greater direct radiance,
and still more for all their general implication of a store of meaning
and mystery and beauty that they alone, from example to example, from
prodigy to prodigy, had to open out, left me comparatively little
crushed by the impression of their concerning me further than my own
action perhaps could make good. It was as if I had seen that all there
was for me of these great things I should sooner or later take; the
amount would be immense, yet, as who should say, all on the same plane
and the same connection, the aesthetic, the "artistic," the romantic in
the looser sense, or in other words in the air of the passions of the
intelligence. What other passions of a deeper strain, whether personal
or racial, and thereby more superstitiously importunate, I must have
felt involved in the question of an effective experience of English life
I was doubtless then altogether unprepared t