friends, capital
friends; but we are obliged to keep our traps set on both sides of the
wall; we could not possibly keep on friendly terms without them, and
our spring guns. The worst of it is, we are both clever fellows
enough; and there's never a day passes that we don't find out a new
trap, or a new gun-barrel, or something; we spend about fifteen
millions a year each in our traps, take it altogether; and I don't see
how we're to do with less." A highly comic state of life for two
private gentlemen! but for two nations, it seems to me, not wholly
comic. Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, if there were only one madman
in it; and your Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is only one
clown in it; but when the whole world turns clown, and paints itself
red with its own heart's blood instead of vermilion, it is something
else than comic, I think.

Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly allow for
that. You don't know what to do with yourselves for a sensation:
fox-hunting and cricketing will not carry you through the whole of
this unendurably long mortal life: you liked pop-guns when you were
schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better
made: but then the worst of it is, that what was play to you when
boys, was not play to the sparrows; and what is play to you now, is
not play to the small birds of State neither; and for the black
eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, if I mistake
not.[205]

I must get back to the matter in hand, however. Believe me, without
further instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's
vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early
Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of
Tuscany; the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. I have no
time to do this to-night (I have done it elsewhere before now);[206]
but I proceed to apply the principle to ourselves in a more searching
manner.

I notice that among all the new buildings that cover your once wild
hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large
proportion, with your mills and mansions; and I notice also that the
churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and
mills are never Gothic. Will you allow me to ask precisely the meaning
of this? For, remember, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. When
Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches; and when
the Italian style s