However,
by the use of the faculty by which you play a piano with both hands, I
got on very comfortably.
Milman's appearance is quite striking; tall, stooping, with a keen
black eye and perfectly white hair--a singular and poetic contrast. He
began upon architecture and Westminster Abbey--a subject to which I am
always awake. I told him I had not yet seen Westminster; for I was now
busy in seeing life and the present, and by and by I meant to go there
and see death and the past.
Milman was for many years dean of Westminster, and kindly offered me
his services, to indoctrinate me into its antiquities.
Macaulay made some suggestive remarks on cathedrals generally. I said
that I thought it singular that we so seldom knew who were the
architects that designed these great buildings; that they appeared to
me the most sublime efforts of human genius.
He said that all the cathedrals of Europe were undoubtedly the result
of one or two minds; that they rose into existence very nearly
contemporaneously, and were built by travelling companies of masons,
under the direction of some systematic organization. Perhaps you knew
all this before, but I did not; and so it struck me as a glorious
idea.
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