422 THE OPENING OF 



palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the 

 walls of the chamber were parted, and through their gap, the 

 nearest human beings who were famishing, and in misery, 

 were borne into the midst of the company feasting and 

 fancy-free if, pale with sickness, horrible in destitution, 

 broken by despair, body by body, they were laid upon the^ 

 soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest, would only 

 the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them would only a 

 passing glance, a passing thought be vouchsafed to them ? 

 Yet the actual facts, the real relations of each Dives and Laza- 

 rus, are not altered by the intervention of the house wall be- 

 tween the table and the sick-bed by the few feet of ground 

 (how few !) which are indeed all that separate the merriment 

 from the misery. 



It is the same in the matters of which I have hitherto been 

 speaking. If every one of us, who knows what food for the 

 human heart there is in the great works of elder time, could 

 indeed see with his own eyes their progressive ruin ; if every 

 earnest antiquarian, happy in his well-ordered library, and in 

 the sense of having been useful in preserving an old stone or 

 two out of his parish church, and an old coin or two out of a 

 furrow in the next ploughed field, could indeed behold, each 

 morning as he awaked, the mightiest works of departed nations 

 mouldering to the ground in disregarded heaps ; if he could 

 always have in clear phantasm before his eyes the ignorant 

 monk trampling on the manuscript, the village mason striking 

 down the monument, the court painter daubing the despised 

 and priceless masterpiece into freshness of fatuity, he would 

 not always smile so complacently in the thoughts of the little 

 learnings and petty preservations of his own immediate sphere. '. 

 And if every man who has the interest of Art and of History at 

 heart, would at once devote himself earnestly not to enrich 

 his own collection not even to enlighten his own neighbours 

 or investigate his own parish -territory but to far-sigr/ted and 

 /ore-sighted endeavour in the great field of Europe, there is 

 yet time to do much. An association might be formed, 

 thoroughly organised so as to maintain active watchers and 

 agents in every town of importance, who, in the first place, 



