it down on the
sunshiny grass. You would like the book. In defiance of all this, I
have hung my room with pictures, like very old fiddles indeed: but I
agree with Sir George and Constable both. I like pictures that are not
like nature. I can have nature better than any picture by looking out of
my window. Yet I respect the man who tries to paint up to the freshness
of earth and sky. Constable did not wholly achieve what he tried at: and
perhaps the old masters chose a soberer scale of things as more within
the compass of lead paint. To paint dew with lead!

I also plunge away at my old Handel of nights, and delight in the Allegro
and Penseroso, full of pomp and fancy. What a pity Handel could not have
written music to some great Masque, such as Ben Jonson or Milton would
have written, if they had known of such a musician to write for.

_To S. Laurence_.

_May_, 1844.

DEAR LAURENCE,

I hope your business is settled by this time. I have seen praise of your
picture in the Athenaeum, which quoted also the Chronicle's good opinion.
I am very glad of all this and I hope you will now set to work, and paint
away with ease and confidence, forgetting that there is such a hue as
bottle-green {166} in the universe (it was tastefully omitted from the
rainbow, you see); and, in spite of what Moore says, paint English people
in English atmospheres. Your Coningham was rather orange, wasn't he? But
he was very good, I thought. Dress your ladies in cheerful dresses, not
quite so vulgar as Chalon's. . . . I heard from my sister that you had
finished Wilkinson to the perfect content of all: I had charged her
particularly not to allow Mrs. W. to intercede for any smirk or
alteration whatever.

My Venetian pictures look very grand on my walls, which previously had
been papered with a still green (not bottled) on purpose to receive them.
On my table is a long necked bottle with three flowers just now in it . . .
a tuft of rhododendron, a tuft of scarlet geranium, and a tuft of white
gilli-flower. Do you see these in your mind's eye? I wish you could
come down here and refresh your sodden eyes with pure daylight, budding
oak trees, and all the changes of sky and cloud. To live to make sonnets
about these things, and doat upon them, is worse Cockneyism than
rejoicing in the sound of Bow Bells for ever so long: but here one has
them whether one will or no: and they are better than Lady Morgan and ---
at a rout in Harley St