ight of my ideas makes me discontented with my
work."

"What has happened?'

"There is a critic in my room. I had no idea there was a critic in the
creation, and there is one in my room.

"Has he bought your picture, my poor boy?" said Mrs. Gatty,
distrustfully.

To her surprise he replied:

"Yes! he has got it; only eighty pounds for an immortal picture."

Mrs. Gatty was overjoyed, Gatty was a little sad; but, reviving, he
professed himself glad; the picture was going to a judge.

"It is not much money," said he, "but the man has spoken words that are
ten thousand pounds to me."

He returned to the room; his visitor, hat in hand, was about to go;
a few words were spoken about the art of painting, this led to a
conversation, and then to a short discussion.

The newcomer soon showed Mr. Charles Gatty his ignorance of facts.

This man had sat quietly before a multitude of great pictures, new and
old, in England.

He cooled down Charles Gatty, Esq., monopolist of nature and truth.

He quoted to him thirty painters in Germany, who paint every stroke of a
landscape in the open air, and forty in various nations who had done it
in times past.

"You, sir," he went on, "appear to hang on the skirts of a certain
clique, who handle the brush well, but draw ill, and look at nature
through the spectacles of certain ignorant painters who spoiled canvas
four hundred years ago.

"Go no further in that direction.

"Those boys, like all quacks, have one great truth which they disfigure
with more than one falsehood.

"Hold fast their truth, which is a truth the world has always possessed,
though its practice has been confined to the honest and laborious few.

"Eschew their want of mind and taste.

"Shrink with horror from that profane _culte de laideur,_ that 'love of
the lopsided,' they have recovered from the foul receptacles of decayed
art."

He reminded him further, that "Art is not imitation, but illusion; that
a plumber and glazier of our day and a medieval painter are more alike
than any two representatives of general styles that can be found; and
for the same reason, namely, that with each of these art is in its
infancy; these two sets of bunglers have not learned how to produce the
illusions of art."

To all this he added a few words of compliment on the mind, as well as
mechanical dexterity, of the purchased picture, bade him good morning,
and glided away like a passing sunbeam.

"A mother's blessing