490 PRÆTERITA-III

Under the fulmination of which answer I retired, as from Maurice’s, from the séance in silence; nor ever attended another of the kind from that day to this.

17. But neither the Puritanism of Belgravia, nor Liberalism of Red Lion Square,¹ interested, or offended, me, otherwise than as the grotesque conditions of variously typhoid or smoke-dried London life. To my old Scotch shepherd Puritanism, and the correspondent forms of noble French Protestantism, I never for an instant failed in dutiful affection and honour. From John Bunyan and Isaac Ambrose, I had received the religion by which I still myself lived, as far as I had spiritual life at all; and I had again and again proof enough of its truth, within limits, to have served me for all my own need, either in this world or the next. But my ordained business, and mental gifts, were outside of those limits. I saw, as clearly as I saw the sky and its stars, that music in Scotland was not to be studied under a Free Church precentor, nor indeed under any disciples of John Knox, but of Signior David; that, similarly, painting in England was not to be admired in the illuminations of Watts’s hymns; nor architecture in the design of Mr. Irons’s chapel in the Grove.² And here I must take up a thread of my mental history, as yet unfastened.

18. I have spoken several times of the effect given cheaply to my drawings of architecture by dexterous dots and flourishes, doing duty for ornament.³ Already, in 1845, I had begun to distinguish Corinthian from Norman capitals, and in 1848, drew the niches and sculpture of French Gothic with precision and patience. But I had never cared for ornamental design until in 1850 or ‘51 I chanced, at a bookseller’s in a back alley, on a little fourteenth-century Hours of the Virgin, not of refined work, but extremely rich, grotesque, and full of pure colour.

¹ [The first home of the Working Men’s College.]

² [Joseph Irons (1785-1852), evangelical preacher; minister of Grove Chapel, Camberwell, 1818-1852.]

³ [In passages, however, omitted on revision: see now pp. 611, 612, 624.]

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