Those were the days, too, of the old school of artists--men who, if their
powers of creation were not always proportioned to their ambition for
excellence, were as superior to their more recent successors in their
pure conceptions of what art should be as Apelles was to the Pompeian
wall-painters, and as the Pompeians were to modern house-decorators. The
age of Overbeck and the last religious painters was almost past, but the
age of fashionable artistic debauchery had hardly begun. Water-colour
was in its infancy; wood-engraving was hardly yet a great profession;
but the "Dirty Boy" had not yet taken a prize at Paris, nor had indecency
become a fine art. The French school had not demonstrated the startling
distinction between the nude and the naked, nor had the English school
dreamed nightmares of anatomical distortion.

Darwin's theories had been propagated, but had not yet been passed into
law, and very few Romans had heard of them; still less had any one been
found to assert that the real truth of these theories would be soon
demonstrated retrogressively by the rapid degeneration of men into apes,
while apes would hereafter have cause to congratulate themselves upon not
having developed into men. Many theories also were then enjoying vast
popularity which have since fallen low in the popular estimation. Prussia
was still, in theory, a Power of the second class, and the empire of
Louis Napoleon was supposed to possess elements of stability. The great
civil war in the United States had just been fought, and people still
doubted whether the republic would hold together. It is hard to recall
the common beliefs of those times. A great part of the political creed of
twenty years ago seems now a mass of idiotic superstition, in no wise
preferable, as Macaulay would have said, to the Egyptian worship of cats
and onions. Nevertheless, then, as now, men met together secretly in
cellars and dens, as well as in drawing-rooms and clubs, and whispered
together, and said their theories were worth something, and ought to be