One beauty of the Old World shops is that if a visitor comes back to the place where he left them fifty years before, he finds them, or has a great chance of finding them, just where they stood at his former visit.  In driving down to the old city, to the place of business of the Barings, I found many streets little changed.  Temple Bar was gone, and the much-abused griffin stood in its place.  There was a shop close to Temple Bar, where, in 1834, I had bought some brushes.  I had no difficulty in finding Prout’s, and I could not do less than go in and buy some more brushes.  I did not ask the young man who served me how the old shopkeeper who attended to my wants on the earlier occasion was at this time.  But I thought what a different color the locks these brushes smooth show from those that knew their predecessors in the earlier decade!

I ought to have made a second visit to the Tower, so tenderly spoken of by Artemus Ward as “a sweet boon,” so vividly remembered by me as the scene of a personal encounter with one of the animals then kept in the Tower menagerie.  But the project added a stone to the floor of the underground thoroughfare which is paved with good intentions.

St. Paul’s I must and did visit.  The most striking addition since I was there is the massive monument to the Duke of Wellington.  The great temple looked rather bare and unsympathetic.  Poor Dr. Johnson, sitting in semi-nude exposure, looked to me as unhappy as our own half-naked Washington at the national capital.  The Judas of Matthew Arnold’s poem would have cast his cloak over those marble shoulders, if he had found himself in St. Paul’s, and have earned another respite.  We brought away little, I fear, except the grand effect of the dome as we looked up at it.  It gives us a greater idea of height than the sky itself, which we have become used to looking upon.

A second visit to the National Gallery was made in company with A——.  It was the repetition of an attempt at a draught from the Cup of Tantalus.  I was glad of a sight of the Botticellis, of which I had heard so much, and others of the more recently acquired paintings of the great masters; of a sweeping glance at the Turners; of a look at the well-remembered Hogarths and the memorable portraits by Sir Joshua.  I carried away a confused mass of impressions, much as the soldiers that sack a city go off with all the precious things they can snatch up, huddled into clothes-bags and pillow-cases.  I am reminded, too, of Mr. Galton’s composite portraits; a thousand glimpses, as one passes through the long halls lined with paintings, all blending in one not unpleasing general effect, out of which emerges from time to time some single distinct image.

In the same way we passed through the exhibition of paintings at the Royal Academy.  I noticed that A——­ paid special attention to the portraits of young ladies by John Sargent and by Collier, while I was more particularly struck with the startling portrait of an ancient personage in a full suit of wrinkles, such as Rembrandt used to bring out with wonderful effect.  Hunting in couples is curious and instructive; the scent for this or that kind of game is sure to be very different in the two individuals.