In
November, 1858, London was still vast, but it was the London of
the eighteenth century that an American felt and hated.
Education went backward. Adams, still a boy, could not guess
how intensely intimate this London grime was to become to him as
a man, but he could still less conceive himself returning to it
fifty years afterwards, noting at each turn how the great city
grew smaller as it doubled in size; cheaper as it quadrupled its
wealth; less imperial as its empire widened; less dignified as it
tried to be civil. He liked it best when he hated it. Education
began at the end, or perhaps would end at the beginning. Thus far
it had remained in the eighteenth century, and the next step took
it back to the sixteenth. He crossed to Antwerp. As the Baron Osy
steamed up the Scheldt in the morning mists, a travelling band on
deck began to play, and groups of peasants, working along the
fields, dropped their tools to join in dancing. Ostade and
Teniers were as much alive as they ever were, and even the Duke
of Alva was still at home. The thirteenth-century cathedral
towered above a sixteenth-century mass of tiled roofs, ending
abruptly in walls and a landscape that had not changed. The taste
of the town was thick, rich, ripe, like a sweet wine; it was
mediaeval, so that Rubens seemed modern; it was one of the
strongest and fullest flavors that ever touched the young man's
palate; but he might as well have drunk out his excitement in old
Malmsey, for all the education he got from it.
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