necessity. Even landscapes are
dragged into the domain of sentiment, and Mr. Millais, who copies Nature
with the exactest reverence, cannot call his brook a brook, but "The
sound of many waters;" and a graveyard is not named a graveyard, but
"Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap;" and instead of
_Winding the Clock_ we are told "The clock beats out the life of little
men." A canvas representing "untrodden snow" must be ticketed, for
increase of interest, "Within three miles of Charing Cross." Another is
marked, "Christmas Eve: a welcome to old friends. (See _Silas Marner_.)"
And so on, _ad infinitum_. May one not say _ad nauseam_ before a piece
of marble labelled "Baby doesn't like the water," or a canvas by Faed,
R. A., called "Little cold tooties," or the portrait by the president of
the Academy of a child on her pony denoted not only by the child's name
in full, but her pony's also?

Prominent also at a first visit to a London exhibition stands out the
hesitancy; of English artists to deal with large canvases and life-size
figures--their strict confinement to _genre_ of a domestic or bookishly
archaeological type. This is not the place to discuss the causes of such
a fact, nor to insist on the lack of certain technical qualities in even
the best English work. Such discussions can only be profitable when the
originals are at hand to recriticise the criticism.

More striking than anything to be seen in 1877 at the Royal Academy was
the small collection of pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery, organized and
controlled by a noble amateur--himself a painter also--with the avowed
intention of exhibiting the latest and most eccentric phases of English
art. To a Londoner the opening day was interesting, as revealing the
newest works of the most conspicuous London artists. To a stranger fresh
from continental pictures, old and new, eager to see the touch of hands
so often described in print, it was a revelation not only of a few men's
work, but of the tendency of a national art and the artistic
temperament of a whole people. Superficially, these pictures seemed the
exact opposite of those at the conservative Academy--as aberrant as the
latter were commonplace. But to one who knew them as the work of a
fashionable, highly-educated clique they seemed merely a reaction of the
same spirit that produced the elder style. In striving to get out of the
rut of commonplace which had so long held in its grip the wheels of
Engli