the empyrean, and his descent again, is
always narrated. But as has often been said, the light and the truth may
be on the side of the dreamer: a far wider view than the wise ones
have may be his at that recalcitrant time, and his reduction to common
measure be nothing less than a tragic event. The operation called
lunging, in which a haltered colt is made to trot round and round
a horsebreaker who holds the rope, till the beholder grows dizzy in
looking at them, is a very unhappy one for the animal concerned. During
its progress the colt springs upward, across the circle, stops, flies
over the turf with the velocity of a bird, and indulges in all sorts of
graceful antics; but he always ends in one way--thanks to the knotted
whipcord--in a level trot round the lunger with the regularity of a
horizontal wheel, and in the loss for ever to his character of the
bold contours which the fine hand of Nature gave it. Yet the process is
considered to be the making of him.

Whether Somerset became permanently made under the action of the
inevitable lunge, or whether he lapsed into mere dabbling with the
artistic side of his profession only, it would be premature to say; but
at any rate it was his contrite return to architecture as a calling that
sent him on the sketching excursion under notice. Feeling that something
still was wanting to round off his knowledge before he could take his
professional line with confidence, he was led to remember that his own
native Gothic was the one form of design that he had totally neglected
from the beginning, through its having greeted him with wearisome
iteration at the opening of his career. Now it had again returned to
silence; indeed--such is the surprising instability of art 'principles'
as they are facetiously called--it was just as likely as not to sink
into the neglect and oblivion which had been its lot in Georgian times.
This accident of being out of vogue lent English Gothic an additional
charm to one of his proclivities; and away he went to make it the
business of a summer circuit in the west.

The quiet time of evening, the secluded neighbourhood, the unusually
gorgeous liveries of the clouds packed in a pile over that quarter of
the heavens in which the sun had disappeared, were such as to make
a traveller loiter on his walk. Coming to a stile, Somerset mounted
himself on the top bar, to imbibe the spirit of the scene and hour. The
evening was so still that every trifling sound