tom, with no building stone at hand, and therefore she was
forecondemned by her very position to the curse of brick and stucco,
when Bath, Oxford, Edinburgh, were all built out of their own quarries.
Then fire destroyed all her mediaeval architecture, leaving her only
Westminster Abbey to suggest the greatness of her losses. But
brick-earth and fire have been as nothing in their way by the side of
the evil wrought by Gog and Magog. When five hundred trembling ghosts of
naked Lord Mayors have to answer for their follies and their sins
hereafter, I confidently expect the first question in the appalling
indictment will be, "Why did you allow the richest nation on earth to
house its metropolis in a squalid village?"

We have a Moloch in England to whom we sacrifice much. And his hateful
name is Vested Interest.

XIII.

_CONCERNING ZEITGEIST._

A certain story is told about Mr. Ruskin, no doubt apocryphal, but at
any rate characteristic. A young lady, fresh from the Abyss of
Bayswater, met the sage one evening at dinner--a gushing young lady, as
many such there be--who, aglow with joy, boarded the Professor at once
with her private art-experiences. "Oh, Mr. Ruskin," she cried, clasping
her hands, "do you know, I hadn't been two days in Florence before I
discovered what you meant when you spoke about the supreme
unapproachableness of Botticelli." "Indeed?" Ruskin answered. "Well,
that's very remarkable; for it took me, myself, half a lifetime to
discover it."

The answer, of course, was meant to be crushing. How should _she_, a
brand plucked from the burning of Bayswater, be able all at once, on the
very first blush, to appreciate Botticelli? And it took the greatest
critic of his age half a lifetime! Yet I venture to maintain, for all
that, that the young lady was right, and that the critic was wrong--if
such a thing be conceivable. I know, of course, that when we speak of
Ruskin we must walk delicately, like Agag. But still, I repeat it, the
young lady was right; and it was largely the unconscious, pervasive
action of Mr. Ruskin's own personality that enabled her to be so.

It's all the Zeitgeist: that's where it is. The slow irresistible
Zeitgeist. Fifty years ago, men's taste had been so warped and distorted
by current art and current criticism that they _couldn't_ see
Botticelli, however hard they tried at it. He was a sealed book to our
fathers. In those days it required a brave, a vigorous, and an origin