north-west passage, he had spent a winter in the ice, and if an amateur,
was not the less a true sailor.

With his brass-buttoned blue coat, and his high coloured cheeks, and his
convict hair--a layer of brickdust--and his air of princely wealth, and
the icebergs and hummocks about him, he looks for adventure without a
thought of his heroism--the country all over.

There he stands, a lover of the sea, and a scientific seaman and engineer
to boot, practical in every line of his face, defying mankind to suspect
that he cherishes a grain of romance. On the wall, just above his
shoulder, is a sketch of a Viking putting the lighted brand to his ship
in mid sea, and you are to understand that his time is come and so should
a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern Viking, ready
for the responsibilities of the title. Sketches of our ancient wooden
walls and our iron and plated defences line the panellings. These
degenerate artists do work hard for their money.

The portrait of John's father, dated a generation back, is just the man
and little else, phantomly the man. His brown coat struggles out of the
obscurity of the background, but it is chiefly background clothing him.
His features are distinguishable and delicate: you would suppose him
appearing to you under the beams of a common candle, or cottage
coalfire--ferruginously opaque. The object of the artist (apart from the
triumph of tone on the canvas) is to introduce him as an elegant and
faded gentleman, rather retiring into darkness than emerging. He is the
ghost of the painter's impasto. Yet this is Ezra Mattock, who multipled
the inheritance of the hundreds of thousands into millions, and died,
after covering Europe, Asia, and the Americas with iron rails, one of the
few Christians that can hold up their heads beside the banking Jew as
magnates in the lists of gold. The portrait is clearly no frontispiece of
his qualities. He married an accomplished and charitable lady, and she
did not spoil the stock in refining it. His life passed quietly; his
death shook the country: for though it had been known that he had been
one of our potentates, how mightily he was one had not entered into the
calculations of the public until the will of the late Ezra Mattock, cited
in our prints, received comments from various newspaper articles. A
chuckle of collateral satisfaction ran through the empire. All England
and her dependencies felt the state of cousinship with t