altation. I am too modern fully to enjoy Tintoretto's
Creation of the Milky Way, I cannot fix my thoughts upon that glowing
and palpitating flesh intently enough to forget, as I can the
make-believe of a fairy tale, that heavy drapery hanging from a cloud,
though I find my pleasure in King Lear heightened by the make-believe
that comes upon it all when the fool says: 'This prophecy Merlin shall
make, for I live before his time:'--and I always find it quite natural,
so little does logic in the mere circumstance matter in the finest art,
that Richard's & Richmond's tents should be side by side. I saw with
delight the 'Knight of the Burning Pestle' when Mr. Carr revived it, and
found it none the worse because the apprentice acted a whole play upon
the spur of the moment and without committing a line to heart. When Ben
Bronson's 'Epicoene' rammed a century of laughter into the two hours'
traffic, I found with amazement that almost every journalist had put
logic on the seat, where our lady imagination should pronounce that
unjust and favouring sentence her woman's heart is ever plotting, & had
felt bound to cherish none but reasonable sympathies and to resent the
baiting of that grotesque old man. I have been looking over a book of
engravings made in the eighteenth century from those wall-pictures of
Herculaneum and Pompeii that were, it seems, the work of journeymen
copying from finer paintings, for the composition is always too good for
the execution. I find in great numbers an indifference to obvious logic,
to all that the eye sees at common moments. Perseus shows Andromeda the
death she lived by in a pool, and though the lovers are carefully drawn
the reflection is upside down that we may see it the better. There is
hardly an old master who has not made known to us in some like way how
little he cares for what every fool can see and every knave can praise.
The men who imagined the arts were not less superstitious in religion,
understanding the spiritual relations, but not the mechanical, and
finding nothing that need strain the throat in those gnats the floods of
Noah and Deucalion, and in Joshua's moon at Ascalon.

CONCERNING SAINTS AND ARTISTS

I took the Indian hemp with certain followers of St. Martin on the
ground floor of a house in the Latin Quarter. I had never taken it
before, and was instructed by a boisterous young poet, whose English was
no better than my French. He gave me a little pellet, if I am no