been buried in the new
foundations. Some one must have staggered away with it. Whither?
Somewhere, I am sure, in some dark vault or cellar, it languishes.

Seek it, fetch it out, bring it to me in triumph. You will always find
me in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo. But I have formed so clear
and sharp a preconception of the portrait that I am likely to be
disappointed at sight of what you bring me. I see in my mind's eye every
falling fold of the white mantle; the nobly-rounded calf of the leg on
which rests the forearm; the high-light on the black silk stocking. The
shoes, the hands, are rather sketchy, the sky is a mere slab; the ruined
temples are no more than adumbrated. But the expression of the face is
perfectly, epitomically, that of a great man surveying a great alien
scene and gauging its import not without a keen sense of its dramatic
conjunction with himself--Marius in Carthage and Napoleon before the
Sphinx, Wordsworth on London Bridge and Cortes on the peak in Darien,
but most of all, certainly, Goethe in the Campagna. So, you see,
I cannot promise not to be horribly let down by Tischbein's actual
handiwork. I may even have to take back my promise that it shall have a
place of honour. But I shall not utterly reject it--unless on the plea
that a collection of unfinished works should itself have some great
touch of incompletion.

SOMETHING DEFEASIBLE July, 1919.

The cottage had a good trim garden in front of it, and another behind
it. I might not have noticed it at all but for them and their emerald
greenness. Yet itself (I saw when I studied it) was worthy of them.
Sussex is rich in fine Jacobean cottages; and their example, clearly,
had not been lost on the builder of this one. Its proportions had a
homely grandeur. It was long and wide and low. It was quite a yard
long. It had three admirable gables. It had a substantial and shapely
chimney-stack. I liked the look that it had of honest solidity all over,
nothing anywhere scamped in the workmanship of it. It looked as though
it had been built for all time. But this was not so. For it was built on
sand, and of sand; and the tide was coming in.

Here and there in its vicinity stood other buildings. None of these
possessed any points of interest. They were just old-fashioned
'castles,' of the bald and hasty kind which I myself used to make
in childhood and could make even now--conic affairs, with or without
untidily-dug moats, the nullities of conven