e does logic in the mere circumstance matter in the finest art,
that Richard's and 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
Jonson'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, and
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 not
forgetting, an hour before dinner, and another after we had dined
together at some restaurant. As we were going through the streets to the
meeting-place of the Martinists, I felt suddenly that a cloud I was
looking at floated in an immense space, and for an instant my being
rushed out, as it seemed, into that space with ecstasy. I was myself
again immediately, but the poet was wholly above himself, and presently
he pointed to one of the street lamps now brightening in the fa