of ours to prevent; but of the destruction of poor little
pictures in peace, from which it surely would not be much out of our way
to save them. You know I said, just now, we were all of us engaged in
pulling pictures to pieces by deputy, and you did not believe me.
Consider, then, this similitude of ourselves. Suppose you saw (as I
doubt not you often do see) a prudent and kind young lady sitting at
work, in the corner of a quiet room, knitting comforters for her
cousins, and that just outside, in the hall, you saw a cat and her
kittens at play among the family pictures; amusing themselves especially
with the best Vandykes, by getting on the tops of the frames, and then
scrambling down the canvases by their claws; and on some one's informing
the young lady of these proceedings of the cat and kittens, suppose she
answered that it wasn't her cat, but her sister's, and the pictures
weren't hers, but her uncle's, and she couldn't leave her work, for she
had to make so many pairs of comforters before dinner. Would you not say
that the prudent and kind young lady was, on the whole, answerable for
the additional touches of claw on the Vandykes?

84. Now, that is precisely what we prudent and kind English are doing,
only on a larger scale. Here we sit in Manchester, hard at work, very
properly, making comforters for our cousins all over the world. Just
outside there in the hall--that beautiful marble hall of Italy--the cats
and kittens and monkeys are at play among the pictures: I assure you, in
the course of the fifteen years in which I have been working in those
places in which the most precious remnants of European art exist, a
sensation, whether I would or no, was gradually made distinct and deep
in my mind, that I was living and working in the midst of a den of
monkeys;--sometimes amiable and affectionate monkeys, with all manner of
winning ways and kind intentions,--more frequently selfish and
malicious monkeys; but, whatever their disposition, squabbling
continually about nuts, and the best places on the barren sticks of
trees; and that all this monkeys' den was filled, by mischance, with
precious pictures, and the witty and wilful beasts were always wrapping
themselves up and going to sleep in pictures, or tearing holes in them
to grin through; or tasting them and spitting them out again, or
twisting them up into ropes and making swings of them; and that
sometimes only, by watching one's opportunity, and bearing a scr