Well, I can’t get that paper of Mr. Frederick Harrison’s out of my head; chiefly because I know and like its writer; and I don’t like his wasting his time in writing that sort of stuff. What I have got to say to him, anent it, may better be said publicly, because I must write it carefully, and with some fulness; and if he won’t attend to me, perhaps some of his readers may. So I consider him, for the time, as one of my acquaintances among working men, and dedicate the close of this letter to him specially. My dear Harrison,—I am very glad you have been enjoying yourself at Oxford; and that you still think it a pretty place. But why, in the name of all that’s developing, did you walk in those wretched old Magdalen walks? They’re as dull as they were thirty years ago. Why didn’t you promenade in our new street, opposite Mr. Ryman’s? or under the rapturous sanctities of Keble? or beneath the lively new zigzag parapet of Tom Quad?—or, finally, in the name of all that’s human and progressive, why not up and down the elongating suburb of the married Fellows, on the cock-horse road to Banbury? However, I’m glad you’ve been at the old place; even though you wasted the bloom of your holiday-spirits in casting your eyes, in that too childish and pastoral manner, “round this sweet landscape, with its myriad blossoms and foliage, its meadows in their golden glory,” etc.; and declaring that all you want other people to do is to “follow out in its concrete results this sense of collective evolution.” Will you only be patient enough, for the help of this old head of mine on stooping shoulders, to tell me one or two of the inconcrete results of separate evolution? Had you done me the honour to walk through my beautifully developing schools, you would have found, just outside of them, (turned out because I’m tired of seeing it, and want something progressive) the cast of the Elgin Theseus. I am tired thereof, it is true; but I don’t yet see my way, as a Professor of Modern Art, to the superseding it. On the whole, it appears to me a very satisfactory type of the human form; arrived at, as you know, two thousand and two hundred years ago. And you tell me, nevertheless, to “see how this transcendent power of collective evolution holds me in the hollow of its hand!” Well, I hope I am handsomer than the Theseus; it’s very pleasant to think so, but it did not strike me before. May I flatter myself it is really your candid opinion? Will you just look at the “Realization of the (your?) Ideal,” in the number of ‘Vanity Fair’ for February 17th, 1872, and confirm me on this point?