a perseverance that nothing could discourage.  Who has not known somewhat indifferent painters mighty busy about their colours and varnishes?  Cornelius caused a pit to be dug for the preparation of the lime, and in the case of the Ludwig Kirche this lime remained there for eight years, with frequent stirrings.  This was in order that the whole fresco, when at last it was entrusted to its bed, should be set there for immortality.  Nor did the master fail to thwart time by those mechanical means that should avert the risk of bulging already mentioned.  He neglected no detail.  He was provident, and he lay in wait for more than one of the laws of nature, to frustrate them.  Gravitation found him prepared, and so did the less majestic but not vain dispensation of accidents.  Against bulging he had an underplot of tiles set on end; against possible trickling from an upper floor he had asphalt; it was all part of the human conspiracy.  In effect, the dull pictures at Munich seem to stand well.  It would have been more just—­so the present age thinks of these preserved walls—­if the day that admired them had had them exclusively, and our day had been exempt.  The painted cathedrals of the Middle Ages have undergone the natural correction; why not the Ludwig Kirche?

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.