The population of Antwerp has been celebrating the tercentenary of
Rubens's birth with three days of high-jinks, more or less artisti- cally arranged. The only failure was in the processions, which seem, with their allegorical cars, to have been a little ridiculous. The point which strikes Englishmen most in reading of such a celebration is its impossibility in England. Honour to a great painter born in an English town would seem to the people of that town ridiculous, and so, we fear, would honour to anybody else not a soldier, a statesman, or a very wealthy man. Imagine Lincoln- shire celebrating the bicentenary of Sir Isaac Newton, and the Sort of comments the people would pass. The incapacity of the English for this kind of reverence is, we suppose, connected with the defect of traditional memory vrhioh induces them to forget their own history, and reveals a serious " fault" in the stratification of their minds. We suppose its cause is a want of the power of perceiving greatness,—that is, of strong imagination. ShOrt- Sighted persons cannot remember faces, not because they have bad memories, but because they have never really seen them.
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