All my earlier views of art were dislocated by the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, 1 May 1877. By that time I had seen all the great galleries of Europe, except the Hermitage, and thus had material for forming an opinion, though the opinion may have been quite wrong. Anyway, I recognized there a style of art that certainly was great, and yet could not be classed with the Old Masters or the Modern Painters, or even as Eclectic. The style is hackneyed now; but in 1877 the _Days of Creation_ was as great a surprise as _Sartor Resartus_ in 1833 or _Pickwick_ in 1836. Carlyle and Dickens were established long before my time, and were suffering then from imitation; and I could not see the reason why those books were praised so lavishly by the people who read them when they first came out. And now the younger generation cannot understand such praising of that picture and the others that were with it. This generation has grown up in a sort of “greenery-yallery” Grosvenor Gallery, and has never had to face the pea-greens and vermilions of the past. Art has made strange moves since then. Personally, I am always glad of the impressions of a mind that is brighter than my own, but I do not want the impressions of a mind that is still duller; and I get impatient, when the dull mind goes with a clumsy hand, so that the artist cannot even give me such impressions as he has. When honest critics praise such work, I fear their minds are very dull indeed. As an executor I was concerned in putting a memorial window into a country church. A relative wished for copies of the figures by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the west window of New College chapel at Oxford. There are only seven there, and this window needed nine. I thought the objection fatal; but the purveyor of stained glass replied “Oh no, not at all: we can design you two to match.” He did design them, and they matched his copies of the other seven, the copies being quite unlike the originals. At the eastern end of Rochester cathedral there is a memorial to Dean Scott, with a gigantic Alpha and Omega on each side of the altar. As he was Dean Liddell’s partner in the great Greek lexicon, the double entendre is rather neat. One sees trophies everywhere of captured flags and guns and other instruments of war; but the neatest trophies that I ever saw, were both at Petersburg. In the Preobrajensky cathedral there was a row of keys of captured cities, hanging up on pegs with little brass labels for the names. These came from conquests in the East; and in the Kazan cathedral there was a similar row of keys of captured cities in the West--Utrecht and Rheims amongst them.