ernoon and sit in
the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely
Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere. Or, to return again
to the past, take as another instance the ancient Greeks. Do you think
that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like? Do you
believe that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figures
of the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in
the triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from the
art, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes,
for instance. You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore
high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their
faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of
our own day. The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through
the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the
truth.--_The Decay of Lying_.

THOMAS GRIFFITHS WAINEWRIGHT

He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.
In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself
'lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death' for having been
unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the
British Museum in order to complete his collection. The sentence now
passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death. He complained
bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of
reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own,
having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was,
had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase,
was at least a _circonstance attenuante_. The permanence of personality
is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law
solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner. There is,
however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was
inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the
prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across
him by chance. They had been going over the prisons of London, searching
for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of
Wainewright. He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but
Macready was 'ho