I have never beheld them in the flesh; but, like all the world, I know their outer aspect well, and could stand a pretty stiff examination in most they have ever written, drawn, or painted.
Other stars of magnitude have risen since, but of the old galaxy four at least still shine out of the past with their ancient lustre undimmed in my eyes—Thackeray; dear John Leech, who still has power to make me laugh as I like to laugh; and for the two others it is plain that the Queen, the world, and I are of a like mind as to their deserts, for one of them is now an ornament to the British peerage, the other a baronet and a millionaire; only I would have made dukes of them straight off, with precedence over the Archbishop of Canterbury, if they would care to have it so.
It is with a full but humble heart that I thus venture to record my long indebtedness, and pay this poor tribute, still fresh from the days of my unquestioning hero-worship. It will serve, at least, to show my reader (should I ever have one sufficiently interested to care) in what mental latitudes and longitudes I dwelt, who was destined to such singular experience—a kind of reference, so to speak—that he may be able to place me at a glance, according to the estimation in which he holds these famous and perhaps deathless names.
It will be admitted, at least, that my tastes were normal, and shared by a large majority—the tastes of an every-day young man at that particular period of the nineteenth century—one much given to athletics and cold tubs, and light reading and cheap tobacco, and endowed with the usual discontent; the last person for whom or from whom or by whom to expect anything out of the common.
* * * * *
But the splendor of the Elgin Marbles! I understood that at once—perhaps because there is not so much to understand. Mere physically beautiful people appeal to us all, whether they be in flesh or marble.
By some strange intuition, or natural instinct, I knew that people ought to be built like that, before I had ever seen a single statue in that wondrous room. I had divined them—so completely did they realize an aesthetic ideal I had always felt.
I had often, as I walked the London streets, peopled an imaginary world of my own with a few hundreds of such beings, made flesh and blood, and pictured them as a kind of beneficent aristocracy seven feet high, with minds and manners to match their physique, and set above the rest of the world for its good; for I found it necessary (so that my dream should have a point) to provide them with a foil in the shape of millions of such people as we meet every day. I was egotistic and self-seeking enough, it is true, to enroll myself among the former, and had chosen for my particular use and wear just such a frame as that of the Theseus, with, of course, the nose and hands and feet (of which time has bereft him) restored, and all mutilations made good.
And for my mistress and companion I had duly selected no less a person than the Venus of Milo (no longer armless), of which Lintot possessed a plaster-cast, and whose beauties I had foreseen before I ever beheld them with the bodily eye.
"Monsieur n'est pas dégoûté!" as Ibbetson would have remarked.