In 1842, then, the nations were standing, as it were, shoulder to shoulder against the walk of time and against his gentle act and art.  They had just called iron into their cabal.  Cornelius came from Munich to London, looked at the walls at Westminster, and put a heart of confidence into the breast of the Commission.  The situation, he averred, need not be too damp for immortality, with due care.  What he had done in the Glyptothek and in the Pinacothek might be done with the best results in England, in defiance of the weather, of the river, of the mere days, of the divine order of alteration, and, in a word, of heaven and earth.

Meanwhile, there was that good servant of the law of change, lime that had not been kept quite long enough, ready to fulfil its mission; they would have none of it.  They evaded it, studied its ways, and put it to the rout.  “Many failures that might have been hastily attributed to damp were really owing to the use of lime in too fresh a state.  Of the experimental works painted at Munich, those only have faded which are known to have been done without due attention to the materials. Thus, a figure of Bavaria, painted by Kaulbach, which has faded considerably, is known to have been executed with lime that was too fresh.”  One cannot refrain from italics:  the way was so easy; it was only to take a little less of this important care about the lime, to have a better confidence, to be more impatient and eager, and all had been well:  not to do—­a virtue of omission.

This is not a matter of art-criticism.  It is an ethical question hitherto unstudied.  The makers of laws have not always been obliged to face it, inasmuch as their laws are made in part for the present, and in part for that future whereof the present needs to be assured—­that is, the future is bound as a guaranty for present security of person or property.  Some such hold upon the time to come we are obliged to claim, and to claim it for our own sakes—­because of the reflex effect upon our own affairs, and not for the pleasure of fettering the time to come.  Every maker of a will does at least this.

Were the men of the sixteenth century so moderate?  Not they.  They found the present all too narrow for the imposition of their will.  It did not satisfy them to disinter and scatter the bones of the dead, nor to efface the records of a past that offended them.  It did not satisfy them to bind the present to obedience by imperative menace and instant compulsion.  When they had burnt libraries and thrown down monuments and pursued the rebels of the past into the other world, and had seen to it that none living should evade them, then they outraged the future.