Its classicalism was not altogether a cant.
When it had happened it seemed to have happened thousands of years ago.
It spoke in parables; in the hammering of spears and the awful cap of Phrygia.

To some it seemed to pass like a vision; and yet it seemed eternal as a group of statuary.

One almost thought of its most strenuous figures as naked.

It is always with a shock of comicality that we remember that its date was so recent that umbrellas were fashionable and top-hats beginning to be tried.

And it is a curious fact, giving a kind of completeness to this sense of the thing as something that happened outside the world, that its first great act of arms and also its last were both primarily symbols; and but for this visionary character, were in a manner vain.