“It was resolved,” said the morning paper, “to colour the borders of the panels and other spaces of Portland stone with arabesques and other patterns, but that no paint should be used, as paint would need renewing from time to time.  The colours, therefore,”—­and here is the passage to be noted—­“are all mixed with wax liquefied with petroleum; and the wax surface sets as hard as marble. . .  The wax is left time to form an imperishable surface of ornament, which would have to be cut out of the stone with a chisel if it was desired to remove it.”  Not, apparently, that a new surface is formed which, by much violence and perseverance, could, years hence, be chipped off again; but that the “ornament” is driven in and incorporate, burnt in and absorbed, so that there is nothing possible to cut away by any industry.  In this humorous form of ornament we are beforehand with Posterity.  Posterity is baffled.

Will this victory over our sons’ sons be the last resolute tyranny prepared by one age for the coercion, constraint, and defeat of the future?  To impose that compulsion has been hitherto one of the strongest of human desires.  It is one, doubtless, to be outgrown by the human race; but how slowly that growth creeps onwards, let this success in the stencilling of St Paul’s teach us, to our confusion.  There is evidently a man—­a group of men—­happy at this moment because it has been possible, by great ingenuity, to force our posterity to have their cupola of St Paul’s with the stone mouldings stencilled and “picked out” with niggling colours, whether that undefended posterity like it or not.  And this is a survival of one of the obscure pleasures of man, attested by history.

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.