or invidious remark--remark I mean upon our
pewless state, which involved, to my imagination, much the same
discredit that a houseless or a cookless would have done--as to hush in
my breast the appeal to our parents, not for religious instruction (of
which we had plenty, and of the most charming and familiar) but simply
for instruction (a very different thing) as to where we should say we
"went," in our world, under cold scrutiny or derisive comment. It was
colder than any criticism, I recall, to hear our father reply that we
could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom and
that there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that of
the Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we need find
ourselves excluded. With the freedom we enjoyed our dilemma clearly
amused him: it would have been impossible, he affirmed, to be
theologically more _en regle_. How as mere detached unaccompanied
infants we enjoyed such impunity of range and confidence of welcome is
beyond comprehension save by the light of the old manners and
conditions, the old local bonhomie, the comparatively primal innocence,
the absence of complications; with the several notes of which last
beatitude my reminiscence surely shines. It was the theory of the time
and place that the young, were they but young enough, could take
publicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, and touchingly enough,
all the difference of the old importances. It wasn't doubtless that the
social, or call it simply the human, position of the child was higher
than to-day--a circumstance not conceivable; it was simply that other
dignities and values and claims, other social and human positions, were
less definite and settled, less prescriptive and absolute. A rich
sophistication is after all a gradual growth, and it would have been
sophisticated to fear for us, before such bright and vacant vistas, the
perils of the way or to see us received anywhere even with the irony of
patronage. We hadn't in fact seats of honour, but that justice was done
us--that is that we were placed to our advantage--I infer from my having
liked so to "go," even though my grounds may have been but the love of
the _exhibition_ in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture,
sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed
most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot
of the mind. Let me at the same time make the point tha