LONDON AGAIN-1894 459 



thought best to minimize the damage done, lest the stream 

 of travel might be scared away. I remarked at the time 

 that we should never know fully what had occurred until 

 we received the American papers ; and, curiously enough, 

 several weeks afterward a Californian showed me a 

 very full and minute account of the whole calamity, with 

 careful details, given in the telegraphic reports of a San 

 Francisco newspaper on the very morning after the 

 earthquake. 



On the way to America I passed a short time, during 

 the month of June, in London, meeting various interest 

 ing people, a most pleasant occasion to me being a dinner 

 given by Mr. Bayard, the American minister, at which 

 I met my classmate Wayne MacVeagh, formerly attorney- 

 general of the United States, minister to Constantinople, 

 and ambassador to Kome, full, as usual, of interesting 

 reminiscence and witty suggestion. Very interesting also 

 to me was a talk with Mr. Holman Hunt, the eminent 

 pre-Raphaelite artist. He told me much of Tennyson, 

 dwelling upon his morbid fear that people would stare 

 at him. He also gave an account of his meeting with 

 Euskin at Venice, when Ruskin took Hunt to task for 

 not having come to see him more frequently in London; 

 to which Hunt replied that, for one reason, he was very 

 busy, and that, for another, he did not wish to be classed 

 with the toadies who swarmed about Ruskin. Whereupon 

 Ruskin said that Hunt was right regarding the char 

 acter of most of the people about him. Hunt also spoke 

 of the ill treatment of his beautiful picture, &quot;The Light 

 of the World. From him, or from another source about 

 that time, I learned that formerly the Keble College peo 

 ple had made much of it ; but that, some one having inter 

 preted the rays passing through the different openings 

 of the lantern in Christ s hand as typifying truth shining 

 through different religious conceptions, the owners of the 

 picture distrusted it, and had recently refused to allow its 

 exhibition in London. 



It surprised me to find Holman Hunt so absorbed in 



