A Laodicean: A Story of To-day | Page 5

with it the
significant flexuousness of mouth and chin, had played upon his
forehead and temples till, at weary moments, they exhibited some
traces of being over- exercised. A youthfulness about the mobile
features, a mature forehead--though not exactly what the world has
been familiar with in past ages--is now growing common; and with the
advance of juvenile introspection it probably must grow commoner still.
Briefly, he had more of the beauty--if beauty it ought to be called--of
the future human type than of the past; but not so much as to make him
other than a nice young man.
His build was somewhat slender and tall; his complexion, though a
little browned by recent exposure, was that of a man who spent much
of his time indoors. Of beard he had but small show, though he was as
innocent as a Nazarite of the use of the razor; but he possessed a
moustache all-sufficient to hide the subtleties of his mouth, which
could thus be tremulous at tender moments without provoking
inconvenient criticism.
Owing to his situation on high ground, open to the west, he remained
enveloped in the lingering aureate haze till a time when the eastern part

of the churchyard was in obscurity, and damp with rising dew. When it
was too dark to sketch further he packed up his drawing, and,
beckoning to a lad who had been idling by the gate, directed him to
carry the stool and implements to a roadside inn which he named, lying
a mile or two ahead. The draughtsman leisurely followed the lad out of
the churchyard, and along a lane in the direction signified.

The spectacle of a summer traveller from London sketching mediaeval
details in these neo-Pagan days, when a lull has come over the study of
English Gothic architecture, through a re-awakening to the art-forms of
times that more nearly neighbour our own, is accounted for by the fact
that George Somerset, son of the Academician of that name, was a man
of independent tastes and excursive instincts, who unconsciously, and
perhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in floating in lonely currents
of thought than with the general tide of opinion. When quite a lad, in
the days of the French Gothic mania which immediately succeeded to
the great English-pointed revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott,
and other mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire
what was good in Palladian and Renaissance. As soon as Jacobean,
Queen Anne, and kindred accretions of decayed styles began to be
popular, he purchased such old-school works as Revett and Stuart,
Chambers, and the rest, and worked diligently at the Five Orders; till
quite bewildered on the question of style, he concluded that all styles
were extinct, and with them all architecture as a living art. Somerset
was not old enough at that time to know that, in practice, art had at all
times been as full of shifts and compromises as every other mundane
thing; that ideal perfection was never achieved by Greek, Goth, or
Hebrew Jew, and never would be; and thus he was thrown into a mood
of disgust with his profession, from which mood he was only delivered
by recklessly abandoning these studies and indulging in an old
enthusiasm for poetical literature. For two whole years he did nothing
but write verse in every conceivable metre, and on every conceivable
subject, from Wordsworthian sonnets on the singing of his tea- kettle to
epic fragments on the Fall of Empires. His discovery at the age of
five-and-twenty that these inspired works were not jumped at by the
publishers with all the eagerness they deserved, coincided in point of
time with a severe hint from his father that unless he went on with his

legitimate profession he might have to look elsewhere than at home for
an allowance. Mr. Somerset junior then awoke to realities, became
intently practical, rushed back to his dusty drawing-boards, and worked
up the styles anew, with a view of regularly starting in practice on the
first day of the following January.
It is an old story, and perhaps only deserves the light tone in which the
soaring of a young man into the empyrean, and his descent again, is
always narrated. But as has often been said, the light and the truth may
be on the side of the dreamer: a far wider view than the wise ones have
may be his at that recalcitrant time, and his reduction to common
measure be nothing less than a tragic event. The operation called
lunging, in which a haltered colt is made to trot round and round a
horsebreaker who holds the rope, till the beholder grows dizzy in
looking at them, is a very unhappy one for the animal concerned.
During its progress the