Granting whatever advance in the ideal of humanity you thus conclude, I still am doubtful of your next reflection. “But these flowers and plants which we can see between the cloisters, and trellised round the grey traceries—” (My dear boy, what have you to do with cloisters or traceries? Leave that business to the jackdaws; their loquacious and undeveloped praise is enough for such relics of the barbarous past. You don’t want to shut yourself up, do you? and you couldn’t design a tracery, for your life; and you don’t know a good one from a bad one: what in the name of common sense or common modesty do you mean by chattering about these?) “What races of men in China, Japan, India, Mexico, South America, Australasia, first developed their glory out of some wild bloom?” Frankly, I don’t know—being in this no wiser than you; but also I don’t care: and in this carelessness am wiser than you, because I do know this—that if you will look into the Etruscan room of the British Museum, you will find there an Etruscan Demeter of—any time you please—B.C., riding on a car whose wheels are of wild roses: that the wild rose of her time is thus proved to be precisely the wild rose of my time, growing behind my study on the hillside; and for my own part, I would not give a spray of it for all Australasia, South America, and Japan together. Perhaps, indeed, apples have improved since the Hesperides’ time; but I know they haven’t improved since I was a boy, and I can’t get a Ribston Pippin, now, for love or money. Of Pippins in Devonshire, of cheese in Cheshire, believe me, my good friend,—though I trust much more than you in the glorified future of both,—you will find no development in the present scientific day;—of Asphodel none; of Apples none demonstrable; but of Eves? From the ductile and silent gold of ancient womanhood to the resonant bronze, and tinkling—not cymbal, but shall we say—saucepan, of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, there is an interval, with a vengeance; widening to the future. You yourself, I perceive, have no clear insight into this solidified dispersion of the lingering pillar of Salt, which had been good for hospitality in its day; and which yet would have some honour in its descendant, the poor gleaning Moabitess, into your modern windily progressive pillar of Sand, with “career open to it” indeed other than that of wife and mother—good for nothing, at last, but burial heaps. But are you indeed so proud of what has been already achieved? I will take you on your own terms, and study only the evolution of the Amazonian Virgin. Take first the ancient type of her, leading the lucent Cobbes of her day, ‘florentes aere catervas.’