asking to be admitted to a share in all sorrow.
And Sentiment, strange to say, is wholly apart
from, and unconnected with, all action. When
you hear a tale of sorrow and suffering it may
be inconvenient to you at the time to come
forward with assistance pecuniary or otherwise,
but are you thereby debarred from identifying
yourself, so to speak, with this grief? Far from
it. You feel! You cast your sympathy forth, as
it were, into the great invisible ocean of Sentiment
which flows around us, you feel that you
are Man sympathising with Man, and a delicious
peace envelops you as in a garment.

And this is Sentiment—hated by the father
Brogg, and by those like him. Poor wretches, I
say again. They may draw their cheques and send
money to the relief of distress, but they will
never know the joys of the sentimentalist even
when he does nothing towards the relief of the
distress for which he feels. I once knew an
especially refined sentimentalist who told me
that he never gave, because, by so doing, he
would, to a certain extent, diminish the misery of
the person whom he relieved, and so would no
longer be able to feel the horror of the case as
fully as before. "I could have spared a
sovereign, but I could not lose the luxury of a tear,"
he said, in—as I think—very touching language.
Nay, but why should I conceal it? It was Brogg
(C. J.) who thus spoke, and I know he could
have spared the sovereign, because he spent a
pound in hothouse grapes—of which he was
very fond—that very day.

I have anticipated a little again; we are still
occupied with one great man's childhood and
early youth. Of this time, let me frankly own
that I speak only from what I have heard. I
describe a period considerably anterior to that
which brought me personally acquainted with
the subject of our memoir. For what I know
of this time then, I am indebted to friends who
were in the habit of frequenting the house, such as
the Reverend Smear, James Brogg, H. K. Brogg,
and others. The reports of this last witness, H. K.
Brogg to wit, I have only taken for what they
were worth, bearing with his scornful language
and perverted views, in the hope of being able to
extract useful information from what he said.

C. J., it appears, was not very fond of the
society of boys of his own age, nor were they in
turn particularly enamoured of his. He was not
understood. His philosophy went for nothing,
whilst his ignorance in the matter of cricket and
rounders, went for a great deal against him. The
experiment was tried two or three times of
allowing C. J. to visit some young friends who
lived a little way out of town, but on his returning
the last time with a surfeit from running, a
swollen nose from a "misunderstanding," and a
bad indigestion, it was decided that the experiment
should not be tried again, and this all the
more because the rumour reached Mrs. B. that
the unappreciative youths whom her darling
had visited had pronounced him not only to
be a muff, but a fussy little snob.

The nose, and the surfeit, and the indigestion,
rendered it necessary that C. J. should keep his
bed all next day, which he did, while the
Reverend Smear, having a holiday, was able to devote
himself to his favourite amusement of painting
in oils. His was a light touch and a free pencil,
and it is probable that no man ever covered
canvas more swiftly, or managed to create such
a smell of paint in a house, as our tutor. He did
not stint colour either on his canvas or
elsewhere, but bestowed it liberally on the furniture
and on his own wearing apparel. The subjects
chosen by the Reverend Christopher were always
remarkably selected, and possessed always some
hidden vein of interest which the spectator was
expected to understand by intuition. Thus he
would paint "A Robber's Cave; the Robbers are
absent on one of their marauding Expeditions, and
the Chief is at this moment supposed to be
sparing the life of a Lady of great personal
charms." "The Blasted Heath, just before the
entry of the Weird Sisters and Macbeth upon the
Scene," would be another of his selections. The
Reverend Smear was quite a brilliant amateur,
and had sent pictures to the Royal Academy,
which body had been so afraid of not placing
them as the artist would have wished, that they
had never placed them at all.

Mr. Smear was entirely independent of Nature,
and could strike off a landscape or human figure
in a very short time, without in either case having
any object before him to paint from.

The Reverend Christopher's performances, as
an artist, are only dwelt upon in this place,
because it was in connexion with them that another
of those remarkable answers—two of which have
already been here set down—was drawn from our
hero's lips, or rather, to be more exact, through
his lips from his brain. The tutor, it seems, had,
after considerable labour, succeeded in completing
to his satisfaction a picture of an interior, in which
was represented, among other things, a window,
by which, indeed, the said interior was lighted.
This picture had been kept a secret from C. J.
while in progress, being intended for a surprise,
and, in truth, for a present from the excellent
Smear. It was only shown, then, to our
interesting young friend when in a completed state.
It was not C. J.'s practice, at any period of his
life, to give praise to anything. I have never
ascertained the reason of this, but I think he
conceived that praise produces a relaxation
of effort, and that he wished to keep the human
race always up to the mark, always doing
its best. Be this as it may, it is certain that,
on being shown this work of our brilliant
amateur, he remained for some time perfectly silent,
and when he spoke, it was in the language of
censure.

"I don't quite like your effect, Mr. Smear,"
lie remarked.

"Not like the effect! I am truly grieved,"
said the unhappy artist. "To say the truth, I
had hoped that it was in the effect that I had
excelled."