to call
them certain qualities, here and there, and the best of my actual
purpose is to make amends for that blasphemy. There isn't a thing I can
imagine having missed that I don't quite ache to miss again; and it
remains at all events an odd stroke that, having of old most felt the
thrill of the place in its mighty muchness, I have lived to adore it
backward for its sweet simplicity. I find myself in fact at the present
writing only too sorry when not able to minimise conscientiously this,
that or the other of the old sources of impression. The thing is indeed
admirably possible in a _general_ way, though much of the exhibition was
none the less undeniably, was absolutely large: how can I for instance
recall the great cab-rank, mainly formed of delightful hansoms, that
stretched along Piccadilly from the top of the Green Park unendingly
down, without having to take it for unsurpassably modern and majestic?
How can I think--I select my examples at hazard--of the "run" of the
more successful of Mr. Robertson's comedies at the "dear little old"
Prince of Wales's Theatre in Tottenham Court Road as anything less than
one of the wonders of our age? How, by the same token, can I not lose
myself still more in the glory of a time that was to watch the drawn-out
procession of Henry Irving's Shakespearean splendours at the
transcendent Lyceum? or how, in the same general line, not recognise
that to live through the extravagant youth of the aesthetic era, whether
as embodied in the then apparently inexhaustible vein of the Gilbert and
Sullivan operas or as more monotonously expressed in those "last words"
of the _raffine_ that were chanted and crooned in the damask-hung temple
of the Grosvenor Gallery, was to seem privileged to such immensities as
history would find left to her to record but with bated breath?

These latter triumphs of taste, however, though lost in the abysm now,
had then a good many years to wait and I alight for illustrative support
of my present mild thesis on the comparative humility, say, of the
inward aspects, in a large measure, of the old National Gallery, where
memory mixes for me together so many elements of the sense of an antique
world. The great element was of course that I well-nigh incredibly stood
again in the immediate presence of Titian and Rembrandt, of Rubens and
Paul Veronese, and that the cup of sensation was thereby filled to
overflowing; but I look at it to-day as concomitantly warm and clo