of a knighthood; for we can not forget how, in Eighteen Hundred
Fifteen, Parliament refused to pay for the Elgin Marbles because, as
Lord Falmouth put it, "These relics will tend to prostitute England
to the depth of unbelief that engulfed Pagan Greece." The attitude
of Parliament on the question of Paganism finds voice occasionally
even yet by Protestant England making darkness dense with the
asseveration that Catholics idolatrously worship the pictures and
statues in their churches.

The Romans tumbled the Athenian marbles from their pedestals, on the
assumption that the statues represented gods that were idolatrously
worshiped by the Greeks. And they continued their work of
destruction until a certain Roman general (who surely was from
County Cork) stopped the vandalism by issuing an order, coupled with
the dire threat that any soldier who stole or destroyed a statue
should replace it with another equally good.

Lord Elgin bankrupted himself in order to supply the British Museum
its crowning glory, and for this he achieved the honor of getting
himself poetically damned by Lord Byron. Monarchies, like republics,
are ungrateful. Lord Elgin defended himself vigorously against the
charge of Paganism, just as Raphael had done three hundred years
before. But Burne-Jones was silent in the presence of his accusers,
for the world of buyers besieged his doors with bank-notes in hand,
demanding pictures. And now today we find Alma-Tadema openly and
avowedly Pagan, and with a grace and loveliness that compel the glad
acclaim of every lover of beautiful things.

We are making head. We have ceased to believe that Paganism is
"bad." All the men and women who have ever lived and loved and hoped