the strangest Malays and Hindoos, and I wonder what these made of them,
as they contemplated their segregation with the other thronging
spectators.

We had not pledged ourselves not to go to the Zoo; we were there quite
voluntarily; but among the places which we promised ourselves not to
visit again were the South Kensington Museum and the National Gallery;
and I shall always be glad that we did not keep faith with ourselves in
regard to the last. We went to it again not once, but several times, and
always with an increasing sense of its transcendent representativity. It
is not merely that for all the schools of painting it is almost as good
as going to the continental countries where they flourished, and is much
easier. It is not only that for English history, as it lives in the
portraiture of kings and queens, and their courtiers and courtesans and
heroes and statesmen, it is the past made personal to the beholder and
forever related to himself, as if he had seen those people in the flesh.
It is, above everything else, for those rooms upon rooms crowded with
the pictures and statues and busts of the Englishmen who have made
England England in every field of achievement that is oppressively,
almost crushingly wonderful. Before that swarming population of poets,
novelists, historians, essayists, dramatists; of painters, sculptors,
architects; of astronomers, mathematicians, geologists, physicians; of
philosophers, theologians, divines; of statesmen, politicians,
inventors, actors; of philanthropists, reformers, economists, the great
of our own history need not, indeed, shrink in form, but must dwindle in
number till our past seems as thinly peopled as our continent. It is in
these rooms that the grandeur of England, historically, resides. You
may, if you are so envious, consider it in that point and this, and at
some point find her less great than the greatest of her overgrown or
overgrowing daughters, but from the presence of that tremendous