85. The principal decoration of the descent is again a gas-lamp, but a shattered one, with a brass crown on the top of it, or, rather, half-crown, and that turned the wrong way, the back of it to the river and causeway, its flame supplied by a visible pipe far wandering along the wall; the whole apparatus being supported by a rough cross-beam. Fastened to the center of the arch above is a large placard, stating that the Royal Humane Society's drags are in constant readiness, and that their office is at 4, Trafalgar Square. On each side of the arch are temporary, but dismally old and battered boardings, across two angles capable of unseemly use by the British public. Above one of these is another placard, stating that this is the Victoria Embankment. The steps themselves--some forty of them--descend under a tunnel, which the shattered gas-lamp lights by night, and nothing by day. They are covered with filthy dust, shaken off from infinitude of filthy feet; mixed up with shreds of paper, orange-peel, foul straw, rags, and cigar-ends, and ashes; the whole agglutinated, more or less, by dry saliva into slippery blotches and patches; or, when not so fastened, blown dismally by the sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, and Peace of Heaven. 86. I am obliged always to use the English word 'Grace' in two senses, but remember that the Greek [Greek: charis] includes them both (the bestowing, that is to say, of Beauty and Mercy); and especially it includes these in the passage of Pindar's first ode, which gives us the key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (Sec. 151), that the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar pauses,--not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility in the circumstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of Demeter,--and gives his own reading of the event, instead of the ancient one. He justifies this to himself, and to his hearers, by the plea that myths have, in some sort, or degree, ([Greek: pou ti],) led the mind of mortals beyond the truth; and then he goes on:-- "Grace, which creates everything that is kindly and soothing for mortals, adding honor, has often made things, at first untrustworthy, become trustworthy through Love."