I found, on the morrow in question—the great day had been the 22nd—the main suggestion of a journey from the south of England up to Waterloo and across from Waterloo to Paddington to be that of one of those deep gasps or wild staggers, losses of wind and of balance, that follow some tremendous effort or some violent concussion. The weather was splendid and torrid and London a huge dusty cabless confusion of timber already tottering, of decorations already stale, of _badauds_ already bored. The banquet-hall was by no means deserted, but it was choked with mere echoes and candle-ends; one had heard often enough of a “great national awakening,” and this was the greatest it would have been possible to imagine. Millions of eyes, opening to dust and glare from the scenery of dreams, seemed slowly to stare and to try to recollect. Certainly at that distance the omens were poor for such concentration as a French critic might have been moved to count upon, and even on reaching Oxford I was met by the sense that the spirit of that seat of learning, though accustomed to intellectual strain, had before the afternoon but little of a margin for pulling itself together. Let me say at once that it made the most of the scant interval and that when five o’clock came the bare scholastic room at the Taylorian offered M. Bourget’s reputation and topic, in the hot dead Oxford air, an attention as deep and as many-headed as the combination could ever have hoped to command. For one auditor of whom I can speak, at all events, the occasion had an intensity of interest transcending even that of Flaubert’s strange personal story—which was part of M. Bourget’s theme—and of the new and deep meanings that the lecturer read into it. Just the fact of the occasion itself struck me as having well-nigh most to say, and at any rate fed most the all but bottomless sense that constitutes to-day my chief receptacle of impressions; a sense which at the same time I fear I cannot better describe than as that of the way we are markedly going. No undue eagerness to determine whether this be well or ill attaches to the particular consciousness I speak of, and I can only give it frankly for what, on the whole, it most, for beguilement, for amusement, for the sweet thrill of perception, represents and achieves—the quickened notation of our “modernity.” I feel that I can pay this last-named lively influence no greater tribute than by candidly accepting as an aid to expression its convenient name. To do that doubtless is to accept with the name a host of other things. From the moment, at any rate, the quickening I speak of sets in it is wonderful how many of these other things play, by every circumstance, into the picture.