goat-footed Pan, Europa's Bull, Romulus's She-wolf, and
the Correggiosity of Correggio, contain, for instance, no portrait of
Friedrich the Great; no likeness at all, or next to none at all, of the
noble series of human realities, or of any part of them, who have sprung
not from the idle brains of dreaming dilettanti, but from the Head of
God Almighty, to make this poor authentic earth a little memorable for
us, and to do a little work that may be eternal there."

* * *

237. But we must surely, in fairness to modernism, remember that
although no portraits of great Frederick, of a trustworthy character,
may be found at Berlin, portraits of the English squire, be he great or
small, may usually be seen at his country house. And Edinburgh, as I
lately saw,--if she boasts of no Venetian perfectness of art in the
portraiture of her Bruce or James, her Douglas or Knox, at Holyrood, has
at least a charming portrait of a Scottish beauty in the Attic
Institution, whose majesty, together with that of the more extensive
glass roofs of the railway station, and the tall chimney of the
gasworks, inflates the Caledonian mind, contemplative around the spot
where the last of its minstrels appears to be awaiting eternal
extinction under his special extinguisher;--and pronouncing of all its
works and ways that they are very good.

And are there not also sufficiently resembling portraits of all the
mouthpieces of constituents in British Parliament--as their vocal powers
advance them into that worshipful society--presented to the people, with
due felicitation on the new pipe it has got to its organ, in the
_Illustrated_ or other graphic _News_? Surely, therefore, it cannot be
portraiture of merely human greatness of mind that we are anyway short
of; but another manner of greatness altogether? And may we not regret
that as great Frederick is dead, so also great Pan is dead, and only the
goat-footed Pan, or rather the goat's feet of him without the Pan, left
for portraiture?

* * *

238. I chanced to walk, to-day, 9th of November, through the gallery of
the Liverpool Museum, in which the good zeal and sense of Mr. Gatty have
already, in beautiful order, arranged the Egyptian antiquities, but have
not yet prevailed far enough to group, in like manner, the scattered
Byzantine and Italian ivories above. Out of which collection, every way
valuable, two primarily important pieces, it seems to me, may be