It is impossible to read the Thirty-nine Articles, for example, and not to recognize in those acts of final, all-resolute, eager, eternal legislation one of the strongest of all recorded proofs of this former human wish.  If Galileo’s Inquisitors put a check upon the earth, which yet moved, a far bolder enterprise was the Reformers’ who arrested the moving man, and inhibited the moving God.  The sixteenth century and a certain part of the age immediately following seem to be times when the desire had conspicuously become a passion.  Say the middle of the sixteenth century in Italy and the beginning of the seventeenth in England—­for in those days we were somewhat in the rear. There is the obstinate, confident, unreluctant, undoubting, and resolved seizure upon power. Then was Rome rebuilt, re-faced, marked with a single sign and style.  Then was many a human hand stretched forth to grasp the fate of the unborn.  The fortunes and the thoughts of the day to come were to be as the day then present would have them, if the dead hand—­the living hand that was then to die, and was to keep its hold in death—­could by any means make them fast.

Obviously, to build at all is to impose something upon an age that may be more than willing to build for itself.  The day may soon come when no man will do even so much without some impulse of apology.  Posterity is not compelled to keep our pictures or our books in existence, nor to read nor to look at them; but it is more or less obliged to have a stone building in view for an age or two.  We can hardly avoid some of the forms of tyranny over the future, but few, few are the living men who would consent to share in this horrible ingenuity at St Paul’s—­this petroleum and this wax.

In 1842 they were discussing the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, and the efforts of all in council were directed upon the future.  How the frescoes then to be achieved by the artists of the day should be made secure against all mischances—­smoke, damp, “the risk of bulging,” even accidents attending the washing of upper floors—­all was discussed in confidence with the public.  It was impossible for anyone who read the papers then to escape from some at least of the responsibilities of technical knowledge.  From Genoa, from Rome, from Munich especially, all kinds of expert and most deliberate schemes were gathered in order to defeat the natural and not superfluous operation of efficient and effacing time.

The academic little capital of Bavaria had, at about the same date, decorated a vast quantity of wall space of more than one order of architecture.  Art revived and was encouraged at that time and place with unparalleled obstinacy.  They had not the malice of the petroleum that does violence to St Paul’s; but they had instead an indomitable patience.  Under the commands of the master Cornelius, they baffled time and all his work—­refused his pardons, his absolutions, his cancelling indulgences—­by