Village books

We meet people every day whose
bodies are evidently those of men and women long dead, but whose
appearance we know through their portraits. We see them going about
in omnibuses, railway carriages, and in all public places. The
cards have been shuffled, and they have drawn fresh lots in life and
nationalities, but anyone fairly well up in medieval and last-
century portraiture knows them at a glance.
Going down once towards Italy I saw a young man in the train whom I
recognized, only he seemed to have got younger. He was with a
friend, and his face was in continual play, but for some little time
I puzzled in vain to recollect where it was that I had seen him
before. All of a sudden I remembered he was King Francis I of
France. I had hitherto thought the face of this king impossible,
but when I saw it in play I understood it. His great contemporary
Henry VIII keeps a restaurant in Oxford Street. Falstaff drove one
of the St. Gothard diligences for many years, and only retired when
the railway was opened.


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