Millais--just as I found
such poems as _Maud_ and _In Memoriam_, by Mr. Alfred Tennyson,
infinitely more precious and dear to me than Milton's _Paradise Lost_
and Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.
Indeed, I was hopelessly modern in those days--quite an every-day young
man; the names I held in the warmest and deepest regard were those of
then living men and women. Darwin, Browning, and George Eliot did not,
it is true, exist for me as yet; but Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens,
Millais, John Leech, George Sand, Balzac, the old Dumas, Victor Hugo,
and Alfred de Musset!
I have never beheld them in the flesh; but, like all the world, I know
their outer aspect well, and could stand a pretty stiff examination in
most they have ever written, drawn, or painted.
Other stars of magnitude have risen since, but of the old galaxy four at
least still shine out of the past with their ancient lustre undimmed in
my eyes--Thackeray; dear John Leech, who still has power to make me
laugh as I like to laugh; and for the two others it is plain that the
Queen, the world, and I are of a like mind as to their deserts, for one
of them is now an ornament to the British peerage, the other a baronet
and a millionaire; only I would have made dukes of them straight off,
with precedence over the Archbishop of Canterbury, if they would care to
have it so.
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