e been more just--so the present age thinks of these
preserved walls--if the day that admired them had had them exclusively,
and our day had been exempt. The painted cathedrals of the Middle Ages
have undergone the natural correction; why not the Ludwig Kirche?

In 1842, then, the nations were standing, as it were, shoulder to
shoulder against the walk of time and against his gentle act and art.
They had just called iron into their cabal. Cornelius came from Munich
to London, looked at the walls at Westminster, and put a heart of
confidence into the breast of the Commission. The situation, he averred,
need not be too damp for immortality, with due care. What he had done in
the Glyptothek and in the Pinacothek might be done with the best results
in England, in defiance of the weather, of the river, of the mere days,
of the divine order of alteration, and, in a word, of heaven and earth.

Meanwhile, there was that good servant of the law of change, lime that
had not been kept quite long enough, ready to fulfil its mission; they
would have none of it. They evaded it, studied its ways, and put it to
the rout. "Many failures that might have been hastily attributed to damp
were really owing to the use of lime in too fresh a state. Of the
experimental works painted at Munich, those only have faded which are
known to have been done without due attention to the materials. _Thus,
a figure of Bavaria, painted by Kaulbach, which has faded considerably,
is known to have been executed with lime that was too fresh_." One
cannot refrain from italics: the way was so easy; it was only to take a
little less of this important care about the lime, to have a better
confidence, to be more impatient and eager, and all had been well:
_not_ to do--a virtue of omission.

This is not a matter of art-criticism. It is an ethical question
hitherto unstudied. The makers of laws have not always been obliged to
face it, inasmuch as their laws are made in part for the present, and in
part for that future whereof the present needs to be assured--that is,
the future is bound as a guaranty for present security of person or
property. Some such hold upon the time to come we are obliged to claim,
and to claim it for our own sakes--because of the reflex effect upon our
own affairs, and not for the pleasure of fettering the time to come.
Every maker of a will does at least this.

Were the men of the sixteenth century so moderate? Not they. They f