Let there be no mistake: we were wholly cognisant that Spring—revivifying Spring—was in the air. Nature was in the ascendant; and for Art—why, let her go hang! The world at such a moment as this bade us rejoice, and would not recognise the cloud upon our own brow. And yet the essence of storm and stress was there, irrepressible and irresistible; for though fogs were gone and east winds barely here, we knew that with Candlemas came the great annual sacrifice, the great refusal, to wit, the closing down until November next of the great bin of peerless Madeira—bottled, oh! ever so many years before the
