ran along the slanting edge of the roof where
nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some
architect friend of my father's, that it had been put there to keep the
birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and
helped us to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to
church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning
I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: "The congregation are
requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung
upon pegs provided for the purpose." In front of every seat hung a little
cushion and these cushions were called "kneelers." Presently the joke ran
through the community, where there were many artists who considered
religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who
disliked that particular church.

II

I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt, when as a
school-boy of twelve or thirteen I had played among the unfinished houses,
once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked by a fall among some
paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I thought it was because these
were real houses, while my play had been among toy-houses some day to be
inhabited by imaginary people full of the happiness that one can see in
picture books.

I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen my
father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me their poetry to
read; and once at Liverpool on my way to Sligo I had seen Dante's Dream in
the gallery there, a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic
power and to-day not very pleasing to me, and its colour, its people, its
romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away. It was a
perpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a
Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first comer, children
selling newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket of fish upon her
head, and that when, moved perhaps by some memory of his youth, he chose
some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it
unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit and its defence
elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools. "We must paint
what is in front of us," or "A man must be of his own time," they would
say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad
drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage