ut Laurence (who has gone for some days into the
country) must see it, and tell me about it. He is so good a judge, that
I ought never to talk till I have first heard his verdict.

I was amused at a passage in Clarissa the other day, which gives one some
idea of what the average state of the arts was among the gentry of a
hundred years ago. Miss Howe, in drawing up a character of her lost
Clarissa, says that among other things she had a fine taste for the
Pencil: had not time to practise it much, but 'was an absolute mistress
of the "should be,"' and then proceeds thus: 'To give a familiar instance
for the sake of young Ladies: she (untaught) observed _when but a child_,
that the Sun, Moon, and Stars, never appeared at once: and were therefore
never to be in one piece: that bears, tygers, lions, were not natives of
an English climate, and should not therefore have a place in an English
landscape: that these ravagers of the forest consorted not with lambs,
kids, or fawns: nor kites, hawks, or vultures, with doves, partridges,
and pheasants.' Such was a prodigy in those days. It is easy to sneer
at this passage: but whoever has read anything of the Masques, etc., of
James's time, will readily recall what absurdities were brought together,
even by the good Scholars of the day: and therefore will not wonder at
the imperfect Natural History that was found in young Ladies' Drawings,
and samplers. I remember now to have seen wonderful combinations of
phenomena in those samplers which are occasionally to be found hung up in
the parlours of Country Inns, and Farm houses.

These letters succeed like the ghosts of Banquo's progeny before the eyes
of Macbeth. Lucky that time itself draws on too close for this letter to
'hold a glass that shews you many more.' You did not answer my question
about the Gainsboroughs. So I won't ask you another.

SONNET ON MY NEW PICTURE.

Oh Twilight! Twilight!!

Rot me, if I am in a poetical humour: I can't translate the picture into
words.

LONDON, _March_ 5, 1842.

MY DEAR BARTON,

Before the cavalcade and suite of Hardinge's (a melancholy procession)
reaches you, I think this letter will. You need not envy me my
purchases, which are imprudent ones: both because I can't well afford
them, and because I have no house to put them. And yet all this gives a
sense of stolen enjoyment to them. I am yet haunted with the ghost of a
Battle-piece (little in my way) at a shop in Holborn: b