ondon, to read papers before the Royal Society, to
enter into controversy with foreign savants, to conduct classes
of outdoor zoology at fashionable watering-places. I held my
breath with admiration as she poured forth her scheme, so daring,
so brilliant, so sure to cover our great man with glory. He
listened to her with an ambiguous smile, and shook his head at
us, and resumed the reading of his Bible.

At the date of which I write these pages, the arts of
illustration are so universally diffused that it is difficult to
realize the darkness in which a remote English village was
plunged half a century ago. No opportunity was offered to us
dwellers in remote places of realizing the outward appearances of
unfamiliar persons, scenes or things. Although ours was perhaps
the most cultivated household in the parish, I had never seen so
much as a representation of a work of sculpture until I was
thirteen. My mother then received from her earlier home certain
volumes, among which was a gaudy gift-book of some kind,
containing a few steel engravings of statues.

These attracted me violently, and here for the first time I gazed
on Apollo with his proud gesture, Venus in her undulations, the
kirtled shape of Diana, and Jupiter voluminously bearded. Very
little information, and that tome not intelligible, was given in
the text, but these were said to be figures of the old Greek
gods. I asked my Father to tell me about these 'old Greek gods'.
His answer was direct and disconcerting. He said--how I recollect
the place and time, early in the morning, as I stood beside the
window in our garish breakfast-room--he said that the so-called
gods of the Greeks were the shadows cast by the vices of the
heathen, and reflected their infamous lives; 'it was for such
things as these that God poured down brimstone and fire on the
Cities of the Plain, and there is nothing in the legends of these
gods, or rather devils, that it is not better for a Christian not
to know.' His face blazed white with Puritan fury as he said
this--I see him now in my mind's eye, in his violent emotion. You
might have thought that he had himself escaped with horror from
some Hellenic hippodrome.

My Father's prestige was by this time considerably lessened in my
mind, and though I loved and admired him, I had now long ceased
to hold him infallible. I did not accept his condemnation of the
Greeks, although I bowed to it. In private I returned to examine
my steel engr