" And diving into the Art Museum under this
inspiration, I came to a little reading-room and found as I had
inferred, old brown books!
It was really a good piece of social comparative anatomy I did that
day; all these museums and libraries that are dotted over London between
Piccadilly and West Kensington, and indeed the museum and library
movement throughout the world, sprang from the elegant leisure of the
gentlemen of taste. Theirs were the first libraries, the first houses
of culture; by my rat-like raids into the Bladesover saloon I became,
as it were, the last dwindled representative of such a man of letters
as Swift. But now these things have escaped out of the Great House
altogether, and taken on a strange independent life of their own.
It is this idea of escaping parts from the seventeenth century system of
Bladesover, of proliferating and overgrowing elements from the Estates,
that to this day seems to me the best explanation, not simply of London,
but of all England. England is a country of great Renascence landed
gentlefolk who have been unconsciously outgrown and overgrown.
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