OCTOBER 77 



Such guardians are necessary ; they hold the hand of 

 the destroyer and arrest decay, keeping for posterity 

 what we ourselves highly value. The old house where 

 Luther rested for the night on his way to the Diet of 

 Worms was being levelled to the ground this summer 

 before my eyes, to make room for a handsome entrance 

 into the courtyard of a large white stucco house. So 

 incongruous was this building to the old sixteenth- 

 century street that had I seen it suddenly I should have 

 said it was a residence, not in Frankfort, but in the 

 Quartier St. Germain in Paris. I honour all societies 

 that save us from this wholesale destruction of the past. 

 In the Goethe house-museum there were some of 

 Goethe's drawings, which made me sympathise more 

 than I had ever done before with Lewes' somewhat 

 bitter reproaches about the time Goethe wasted on 

 drawing. Lewes says : 'All his study and all his prac- 

 tice were vain ; he never attained even the excellence of 

 an amateur. To think of a Goethe thus obstinately 

 cultivating a branch of art for which he had no talent 

 makes us look with kinder appreciation on the spectacle, 

 so frequently presented, of really able men obstinately 

 devoting themselves to produce poetry no cultivated man 

 can read ; men whose culture and insight are insufficient 

 to make them perceive in themselves the difference be- 

 tween aspiration and inspiration.' 



I also went alone to the suburb of Sachsenhausen 

 to see the Staedel Art Institute. Frederick Staedel, in 

 1816, bequeathed his pictures and engravings and 

 100,0002. to his native town. This formed the nucleus 

 of the present gallery. Many pictures have been added 

 since his death, and in many ways the collection is an 

 interesting one. I stood long before a picture which 

 the inscription on the frame told me had been presented 

 by a Baroness Rothschild. Having no catalogue, and 



