s,
which were fine, but not perfectly regular, are fairly enough
represented in his portraits; but no portrait that I have seen gives any
idea of his expression. There were so many things in it, and they chased
each other in and out of his face. I have seen people who were grave and
gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and
the same moment. There were other strange oppositions and contradictions
in his slightly faded and fatigued countenance. He seemed both young and
old, both anxious and indifferent. He had evidently had an active past,
which inspired one with curiosity, and yet it was impossible not to be
more curious still about his future. He was just enough above middle
height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean and long in the flank.
He had the friendliest, frankest manner possible, and yet I could see
that he was shy. He was thirty-eight years old at the time _Beltraffio_
was published. He asked me about his friend in America, about the length
of my stay in England, about the last news in London and the people I
had seen there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the
very form of his questions, and thinking I found it. I liked his voice.

There was genius in his house, too, I thought, when we got there; there
was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and books,
in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in
creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of
one of the pre-Raphaelites. That was the way many things struck me at
that time, in England; as if they were reproductions of something that
existed primarily in art or literature. It was not the picture, the
poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy; these things were the
originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned
in their image. Mark Ambient called his house a cottage, and I perceived
afterwards that he was right; for if it had not been a cottage it must
have been a villa, and a villa, in England at least, was not a place in
which one could fancy him at home. But it was, to my vision, a cottage
glorified and translated; it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced
scale,--it was an old English demesne. It nestled under a cluster of
magnificent beeches, it had little creaking lattices that opened out of,
or into, pendent mats of ivy, and gables, and old red tiles, as well
as a general aspect of being painted in wa