(Darty was Dartineuf, or Dartiquenave, a
famous epicure.)

    Do not, most fragrant Earl, disclaim
    Thy bright, thy reputable flame
      To Bracegirdle the brown;
    But publicly espouse the dame,
      And say G. D. the town.

Earl Leake, by other accounts besides these,
does not appear to have been a person whom
"Bracegirdle the brown," the charmer of the
age, would have thought it any very desirable
honour to marry. We hope, therefore, that
the more respectable Scarsdales—the Curzons
—were always possessors of the house; and
that in displacing the boarding-school they
illustrate, as in greater instances, the injunction
of their curious motto—"Let Curzon
hold what Curzon held."

The corner, above-mentioned, of Wright's
Lane contains a batch of good old family
houses, one of which belonged to Sir Isaac
Newton, though it is not known that he ever
lived in it. A house in which he did live we
shall come to by and by.

The Workhouse, at which you arrive in
turning by this corner, is a large handsome
brick building in the old style before
mentioned, possessed of a garden with seats in it,
and looking (upon the old principle of
association in such matters) more like a building
for a lord than for a set of paupers. Paupers,
however, by the help of Christianity, have
been discovered by the wiser portion of their
fellow-creatures to be persons whom it is
better to treat kindly than contemptuously;
and hence, as new workhouses arise,
something is done to rescue the pauper mind from
its worst, most hopeless, and most exasperating
sense of degradation, and let it participate
some taste of the good consequences of
industry and refinement.

Returning into the road, we here quit the
High Street, and have the Terrace on our
left hand, and Lower Phillimore Place on the
other side of the way.

Terrace, in this, as in so many other
instances in the suburbs, is a ridiculous word;
for the ground is as flat as any around it, and
terrace (a mound of earth) implies height and
dignity.

    May thy lofty head be crown'd
      With many a tower and terrace.—MILTON.

                         ——High
    The structure, skill of noblest architects,
    With gilded battlements conspicuous far,
    Turrets, and terraces, and glittering spires.
                                                                —Ibid.

The modern passion for fine names and foreign
words "hath a preferment in it." It is one
of the consequences of the general rise in
society. But people would do well to learn
the meanings of the words before they employ
them: not to christen young ladies Blanche
who are swarthy; cry bravo (brave he!) to
female singers; nor give the appellation of
heights to houses on a level with a valley.

In Kensington Wilkie the painter passed
the greater part of his life, after quitting
Scotland, and chiefly in Lower Phillimore
Place. For nearly three years beginning
with the autumn of eighteen hundred and
eleven, he dates his letters from Number
Twenty-nine, which was the abode of a friend;
but he then took one of his own. Number
Twenty-four, in which he resided with his
mother and sister, till the autumn of eighteen
hundred and twenty-four, when he removed
with them into the house on the terrace, called
Shaftesbury House, which has since been
rebuilt on a larger scale. Why it is called
Shaftesbury House we cannot learn: perhaps
because the third earl of Shaftesbury, the
author of the Characteristics, who was a
visitor at the Palace, occupied it for a while
before he took his house at Little Chelsea.
Probably there is not an old house in
Kensington, in which some distinguished person
has not resided, during the reigns in which
the court was held there.

Wilkie was a gentle, kindly, considerate
man, with a figure not insignificant though
not elegant, an arch eye, and a large good-
humoured mouth. Such, at least, was his
appearance during the time of life at which
we remember him. He had an original
genius for depicturing humble life, and could
throw into it a dash of the comic; though he
did not possess the Flemish and Dutch eye
for colour; and there was altogether more
truth than enjoyment in his style, sometimes a
tendency to dwell on moral and even physical
pains, the sufferers of which neutralised the
sympathy which they needed by a look of
sordid dulness.

Hazlitt, out of resentment against the
aristocracy for giving their patronage to this
kind of art at the expense of higher, of which
he thought them jealous (and perhaps also in
order to vex Wilkie himself, who was very
deferential to rank), called it the "pauper
style." The appellation, we suspect,
produced the vexation intended, and was one of
the causes of Sir David's efforts to rise into a
manner altogether different; in which he
was not successful. His notion that the
persons in the Old and New Testament should
all have the native, that is to say, the Syrian
or Judaical look, showed the restricted and
literal turn of his mind. He fancied that
this kind of truth would the more recommend
them to the lovers of truth in general; not
seeing that the local peculiarity might hurt
the universality of the impression; for though
all the world feel more or less in the same
manner, they are not fond of seeing the
manner qualified by that of any one particular
nation, especially, too, when the nation has
not been associated in their minds with
anything very acceptable, or even with
acquiescence in the impression to be made. The
next step in this direction might be to