the door, pointed her toes in her long sandalled
slippers, kissed hands to Hester, and disappeared.

It was a very pale face that was raised in expectation
when the third knock fell on Hester’s
door.

“Come in,” said Hester, all her weariness
and fearfulness in her voice.

“Have I come too soon?” asked Mrs.
Hazeldean, advancing out of the shadows with
two outstretched hands, “I ought to have let
you rest. Have I come too soon?”

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
But Hester did not announce that she had
had two visitors already. She only said “no”
in thorough earnest; finding her fingers covered
up in the clasp of two warm hands; letting
her eyes take their delight in this new comer’s
rare face.

TYRANNY OF ART.

I, A wounded worm, am about to try turning,
to see whether I can by any means wriggle
out of my present abject condition, though,
alas! a morbid development of the bump of
veneration renders the hope a faint one. The
first person singular is made use of in deference
to the feelings of fellow-victims; but I am a
representative man, and my class is a large
one. Nature intended me to be happy, for
she endowed me with a variety of tastes and a
great capacity for enjoyment; but man has set
up a number of artificial standards to which
I am incapable of attaining, and this spoils
my pleasure. Some of us are wise enough
to take a line of their own and indulge their
fancies, quite indifferent to the sneers or sermons
of their kind; but as a rule we are
dreadfully anxious to be in order, and to regulate
our likes and dislikes in accordance with
the dictates of acknowledged masters. We are
diffident, subservient to authority, anxious to
conciliate the cognoscenti; but we never get
anything from them but contumely, which is
most depressing. Persons of one taste wear
its channel deep; I have many tastes and they
are naturally all shallow. If I had no taste at
all I might be esteemed, whereas each of my
one-tasted acquaintances looks upon my feeble
and partial admiration as a degradation to the
art which he professes. When a man puts on
a certain ineffable smile, accompanied with an
elevation of the eyebrows and a slight shake of
the head, I know what he is going to do; he is
going to quote the only complete couplet of
Pope that he knows.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.

Very mellifluous; but how is a man to get a
large lump of knowledge all at once? Surely
he must begin with a little. If knowledge be a
good thing, a little of it must be better than
none. Besides, if you come to that, what is a
little, and what is much? At what point in our
educational voyage may we hope that we are
past the mysterious shoals where danger lies?
Then it is easy to say, “drink deep;” but
Nature has denied me a capacious swallow or a
strong head, and I protest against the supercilious
cruelty which would grudge me the little
sip which quenches my inferior thirst.

Why should Maule, my painting friend, rail
at me so bitterly? It does not even appease
him that I admire his own pictures, because
it seems that the real merits are invisible
to me, and that what gives me pleasure in
them is of no artistic value. If I did not
care for pictures at all, he would pity me
merely; but that which excites his wrath and
scorn is, that I get almost as much pleasure
out of the minor beauties as he does out of the
higher. He came upon me one day in the
South Kensington Museum, gloating over one
of Ward’s pigs, and was not angry with me,
“For you understand a good pig, I dare
say;” he condescendingly remarked. But I
thought he would have gone stark staring mad
with me on another occasion for presuming to
enjoy a landscape of Turner’s. I did not know
it was a Turner; it was a painting which took
hold of my imagination. I did not know why.
There was a haze in the atmosphere which
recalled all the most beautiful real sunrises and
sunsets I had ever seen; and the longer I
looked, the more powerful was the effect produced
upon me. So I looked on, and got my
soul into the picture, as it were, until I seemed
to be wandering and exploring, like a gamboge
spirit, about that waste of water, cloud, and
mountain, when Maule burst upon me.

“A fellow like you, who has read bits of
Ruskin without the slightest notion of what he
means, hears that a picture is Turner’s, and
affects to understand it! Why, I tell you it
is impossible you can like that picture.” I
explained humbly that I did not know who
painted it, or I would not have presumed.
“Presumed!” cried he: “why you have been
gazing at it like a man in a dream for half an
hour!”

“I beg pardon; I was in a sort of dream,” I
replied. “I meant no harm, but Claudes and
Turners have that effect upon me, somehow.”

“Ignorant admiration like that is downright
profanation,” growled my friend; “such works
ought not to be exposed to the vulgar gaze.”

It would be very nice to understand some of
the principles upon which good pictures are
distinguished from bad pictures. I have been
through heaps and heaps of foreign churches
and picture galleries, but I am ashamed to say
that I could very seldom manage to extract the
slightest pleasure from saints, martyrs, holy
families, or the secular or mythological works
of the most famous masters. Every now and
then, indeed, I have been repaid for any
amount of boredom. I do believe that I could
go into Antwerp cathedral and gaze upon that
Descent from the Cross, day after day, for
months, without getting tired of it. It seems
to me an inspiration, a miraculous picture.