and brutal now, and will, I hope, at last be so much discontented
with what is bad, that you will determine to bear no longer that
short-sighted, reckless brutality of squalor that so disgraces our
intricate civilisation.

Well, at any rate, London is good for this, that it is well off for
museums,--which I heartily wish were to be got at seven days in the
week instead of six, or at least on the only day on which an
ordinarily busy man, one of the taxpayers who support them, can as a
rule see them quietly,--and certainly any of us who may have any
natural turn for art must get more help from frequenting them than
one can well say. It is true, however, that people need some
preliminary instruction before they can get all the good possible to
be got from the prodigious treasures of art possessed by the country
in that form: there also one sees things in a piecemeal way: nor
can I deny that there is something melancholy about a museum, such a
tale of violence, destruction, and carelessness, as its treasured
scraps tell us.

But moreover you may sometimes have an opportunity of studying
ancient art in a narrower but a more intimate, a more kindly form,
the monuments of our own land. Sometimes only, since we live in the
middle of this world of brick and mortar, and there is little else
left us amidst it, except the ghost of the great church at
Westminster, ruined as its exterior is by the stupidity of the
restoring architect, and insulted as its glorious interior is by the
pompous undertakers' lies, by the vainglory and ignorance of the
last two centuries and a half--little besides that and the matchless
Hall near it: but when we can get beyond that smoky world, there,
out in the country we may still see the works of our fathers yet