Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/328

236 taught him, with a touch of mastery. With him we may wander round and see old scenes in a new light, as the old walls lighted by the bright creepers, or the quaint nooks approached from some new corner, pass on to the paper with deft, rapid strokes. There is very much that will bear seeing very many times. Custom will not stale its varieties. Each season, each hour, adds a new charm. And so happily men come and go, the crowds pass through, while the artist lingers, and fixes for us with his pencil what the old Palace looked like in the last years before the twentieth century.

To some the present, beautiful as it is, is but a poor image of the future; and the old Palace has been imaged in the fine prose of a modern master as it may be when the revolution, which he imagined was to come, is passed and the new time has come. Still, he says, in that dim future, when things shall have changed so much, there was a sort of tradition of pleasure and beauty clinging to the group of buildings, and still people would go there for a summer day. In the great hall tables are spread for dinner, and the old rooms still keep the pictures and the tapestry. And the old place still bears its beauty of old days, and no one can tell what that is so well as he who strives

"A little town of quaint and pretty houses, some