ed on the walls, and adapted, as it were, to
the situation. You may know an R. A. on the private view-day by the
broad, expanding jollity of his visage, if he be a man of that stamp,
or by a certain quiet, self-satisfied smile of self-complacence, if he
be a man of another.

But he looks and bears himself as a host. He cicerones delighted
parties of lady-friends with his face all one smile of courtesy, or he
does the honours with dignity and a lofty sense of--we do not speak
disrespectfully--of being on his own dunghill, in respect to the more
important exigeant connoisseurs, whom he thinks it right to patronise.
He always praises his brethren's works, and discovers in them hidden
virtues. For the Associates, he has minor smiles and milder words. The
ordinary mob of exhibiters he looks down upon with a calm and
complacent gaze, as though from the summit of a Mont Blanc of
superiority. At any bold defier of the conventions and traditions of
the Academy drawing-school, he shakes his head. The pre-Raphaelite
heresy was a sore affliction to him. He looked upon Millais and Hunt
as a Low-church bishop would regard Newman and Pusey. He prophesied
that they would come to no good. He called them 'silly boys;' and he
looks uneasily at the crowds who throng before this year's picture of
the Huguenot Couple--not recovering his self-complacency until his eye
catches his own favourite work, when he feels himself gradually
mollified, and smiles anew upon the world.

Not so the nameless artist, whose work of many toiling days, and many
sleepless nights, has been sent in unprotected to take its chance. He
knows nothing of its fate until he can get a catalogue. It may be on
the line in the east room; it may be above the octagon-room door; it
may not be hung at all. Only the great artistic guns are invited to
the private view, the rest must wait till Monday. Possibly a stray
catalogue puts him so far out of his pain on Sunday. If not, he passes
a feverish and unhappy time till the afternoon of Monday; and then,
first among the crowd, rushes franticly up stairs. We had an
opportunity the other day of seeing the result of a case of the kind.
The picture--a work of great fancy and high feeling, but deficient in
manipulative skill--the artist, a poet in the true sense of the word,
had spent months in dreaming and in joying over. He found it in the
dingiest corner of the octagon-room. His lip quivered and his chest
heaved. He pulled his hat