d people quite odd.
How he managed to attract the notice of any but the Lunacy Commissioners
I cannot conceive. Valued critic, admired artist, model keeper, I only
hope he will attract no further attention.

Since it is clear that the law assists in blackening reputations even in
the grave, I claim that other Miss Brownes who take advantage of life,
and time by the forelock to put up monuments in the sufficiently hideous
thoroughfares should be pronounced _non compos mentis_. The perpetrators
of the erection in High Street, Kensington, hard by St. Mary Abbots, may
serve as an example. Inconvenient, vulgar, inapposite, this should debar
even the subscribers from obtaining probate for their wills. I invoke
posthumous revenge, and claim that at least 500_l_. damages should be
paid as compensation to the nearest hospital for the _indignant_ blind,
as my friend Mr. Vincent O'Sullivan calls them in one of his delightful
stories.

(1906.)

NON ANGELI SED ANGLI.

I wish that the Rokeby Velasquez now firmly secured for the British
nation could have been allowed to remain in Bond Street for a short
while; not to tantalise the foreign countries who so eagerly competed for
its acquisition, nor to emphasise the patriotism of its former owners,
but as a contrast to 'Some Examples of the Independent Art of To-day,'
held at Messrs. Agnew's. Perhaps not as a contrast even, but as a
complement. I do not mean to place all the examples on the same level
with the 'Venus,' though with some I should have preferred to live; yet
the juxtaposition would have asserted the tradition of the younger
painters and the modernity of the older master. 'We are all going
to--Agnew's, and Velasquez will be of the company,' or something like
Gainsborough's dying words would have occurred sooner or later. I am
persuaded that we look at the ancient pictures with frosted magnifying-
glasses, and stare at the younger men from the wrong end of the
binoculars. It was ever thus; it always will be so. Most of us suspect
our contemporaries or juniors. And they--_les jeunes feroces_--are
impatient of their immediate predecessors. _Nos peres out toujours
tort_. Though grandpapa is sometimes quite picturesque; his waistcoat
and old buttons suit us very well. 'Your Raphael is not even divine,'
said Velasquez when he left Rome and that wonderful _p.p.c_. card on the
Doria. 'Your Academicians are not even academic,' some of the younger
painters