further down on his face, and walked quickly
and quietly out.

We would gladly, indeed, see the octagon-room abolished. A picture is
degraded, and an artist is insulted, by a painting being hung in this
darksome and 'condemned cell.' The canvas gets a 'jail-bird' stamp,
and its character is gone. In France, at the Palais-Royal, the young
artists have a far better chance. After a stated time, the pictures,
which, as the best have primarily had the best places, change stations
with their inferiors; so that everybody in turn enjoys the advantages
of the brightest lights and the most favourable points of view.

No need, of course, of attempting even the most summary sketch of the
styles and ordinary subjects of the great painters who bear aloft the
banner of the British school of art--of Landseer's glimpses of the
Highlands; or Stanfield's skyey, breezy landscapes; of the quiet
pieces of English rural scenery--meadows, and woodland glades, and
river bits, fresh and rich, and green and natural--of our Lees, our
Creswicks, our Coopers, our Witheringtons, our Redgraves, our
Ausdills; of the classic elegance and elevated sentiment of groups by
our Dyces and our Eastlakes; of the abundance of clever _genre_
subjects--scenes from history or romance--poured in by our Wards, our
Friths, our Pooles, our Elmores, our Eggs; or of--last, not least--the
strange but clever vagaries of that new school, the pre-Raphaelites,
who are startling both Academy and public by the quaintness of their
art-theories, and the vehement intensity of their style of execution.
All the summer long, the world is free to go and gaze upon them. All
the summer long, the salons are crowded from morning till night--in
the earlier hours, by artists and conscientious amateurs, the humbler
sort of folks, who have daily work to do; in the later, by our old
friends, the staring, _insouciant_, lounging, fashionable mob, whose
carriages and Broughams go creeping lazily round and round Trafalgar
Square. And at parties and balls, and all such reunions, the
exhibition forms a main topic of discourse. Bashful gentlemen know it
for a blessing. Often and often does it serve as a most creditable
lever to break the ice with. The newspapers long resound with critical
columns apropos of Trafalgar Square. You see 'sixth notice' attached
to a formidable mass of print, and read on, or pass on, as you please.
But you distinctly observe, at any rate, the social and
conversational, a