These attracted me violently, and here for the first time I gazed on Apollo with his proud gesture, Venus in her undulations, the kirtled shape of Diana, and Jupiter voluminously bearded.  Very little information, and that tome not intelligible, was given in the text, but these were said to be figures of the old Greek gods.  I asked my Father to tell me about these ‘old Greek gods’.  His answer was direct and disconcerting.  He said—­how I recollect the place and time, early in the morning, as I stood beside the window in our garish breakfast-room—­he said that the so-called gods of the Greeks were the shadows cast by the vices of the heathen, and reflected their infamous lives; ’it was for such things as these that God poured down brimstone and fire on the Cities of the Plain, and there is nothing in the legends of these gods, or rather devils, that it is not better for a Christian not to know.’  His face blazed white with Puritan fury as he said this—­I see him now in my mind’s eye, in his violent emotion.  You might have thought that he had himself escaped with horror from some Hellenic hippodrome.

My Father’s prestige was by this time considerably lessened in my mind, and though I loved and admired him, I had now long ceased to hold him infallible.  I did not accept his condemnation of the Greeks, although I bowed to it.  In private I returned to examine my steel engravings of the statues, and I reflected that they were too beautiful to be so wicked as my Father thought they were.  The dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil budded in my mind, without any external suggestion, and by this reflection alone I was still further sundered from the faith in which I had been trained.  I gathered very diligently all I could pick up about the Greek gods and their statues; it was not much, it was indeed ludicrously little and false, but it was a germ.  And at this aesthetic juncture I was drawn into what was really rather an extraordinary circle of incidents.

Among the ‘Saints’ in our village there lived a shoemaker and his wife, who had one daughter, Susan Flood.  She was a flighty, excited young creature, and lately, during the passage of some itinerary revivalists, she had been ‘converted’ in the noisiest way, with sobs, gasps and gurglings.  When this crisis passed, she came with her parents to our meetings, and was received quietly enough to the breaking of bread.  But about the time I speak of, Susan Flood went up to London to pay a visit to an unconverted uncle and aunt.  It was first whispered amongst us, and then openly stated, that these relatives had taken her to the Crystal Palace, where, in passing through the Sculpture Gallery, Susan’s sense of decency had been so grievously affronted, that she had smashed the naked figures with the handle of her parasol, before her horrified companions could stop her.  She had, in fact, run amok among the statuary, and had, to the intense chagrin of her uncle and aunt,