398 PRÆTERITA-II

enough to conduct the common business of life, are feeble and useless, and when men must trust to emotion for that safety which reason at such times can never give. These are the feelings which led the Ten Thousand over the Carduchian mountains; these are the feelings by which a handful of Greeks broke in pieces the power of Persia: they have, by turns, humbled Austria, reduced Spain; and in the fens of the Dutch, and in the mountains of the Swiss, defended the happiness, and revenged the oppressions of man! God calls all the passions out in their keenness and vigour, for the present safety of mankind. Anger, and revenge, and the heroic mind, and a readiness to suffer;-all the secret strength, all the invisible array of the feelings;-all that nature has reserved for the great scenes of the world. For the usual hopes, and the common aids of man, are all gone! Kings have perished, armies are subdued, nations mouldered away! Nothing remains, under God, but those passions which have often proved the best ministers of His vengeance, and the surest protectors of the world.”

169. These two passages of Sydney’s express, more than any others I could have chosen out of what I know of modern literature, the roots of everything I had to learn and teach during my own life; the earnestness with which I followed what was possible to me in science, and the passion with which I was beginning to recognize the nobleness of the arts and range of the powers of men.

It was a natural consequence of this passion that the sympathy of the art-circles, in praise of whose leading members the first volume of Modern Painters had been expressly written, was withheld from me much longer than that of the general reader; while, on the other hand, the old Roman feuds with George Richmond¹ were revived by it to the uttermost; and although, with amused interest in my youthful enthusiasm, and real affection for my father, he painted a charming water-colour of me sitting at a picturesque desk in the open air, in a crimson waistcoat and white trousers, with a magnificent port-crayon in my hand, and Mont Blanc, conventionalized to Raphaelesque grace, in the distance,² the utmost of serious opinion on my essay which my father could get from him was “that I should know better in time.”

¹ [See above, pp. 275, 276.]

² [See the frontispiece to Vol. III.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]