n that the limits of this large movement, with all its new
and rare refinement, are not yet in sight.

I

It is on the contrary the constant extension that is visible, with
the attendant circumstances of multiplied experiment and intensified
research--circumstances that lately pressed once more on the attention
of the writer of these remarks on his finding himself in the particular
spot which history will perhaps associate most with the charming
revival. A very old English village, lying among its meadows and hedges,
in the very heart of the country, in a hollow of the green hills of
Worcestershire, is responsible directly and indirectly for some of the
most beautiful work in black and white with which I am at liberty to
concern myself here; in other words, for much of the work of Mr. Abbey
and Mr. Alfred Parsons. I do not mean that Broadway has told these
gentlemen all they know (the name, from which the American reader has to
brush away an incongruous association, may as well be written first as
last); for Mr. Parsons, in particular, who knows everything that can be
known about English fields and flowers, would have good reason to insist
that the measure of his large landscape art is a large experience. I
only suggest that if one loves Broadway and is familiar with it, and
if a part of that predilection is that one has seen Mr. Abbey and Mr.
Parsons at work there, the pleasant confusion takes place of itself;
one's affection for the wide, long, grass-bordered vista of brownish
gray cottages, thatched, latticed, mottled, mended, ivied, immemorial,
grows with the sense of its having ministered to other minds and
transferred itself to other recipients; just as the beauty of many a
bit in many a drawing of the artists I have mentioned is enhanced by the
sense, or at any rate by the desire, of recognition. Broadway and much
of the land about it are in short the perfection of the old English
rural tradition, and if they do not underlie all the combinations by
which (in their pictorial accompaniments to rediscovered ballads, their
vignettes to story or sonnet) these particular talents touch us almost
to tears, we feel at least that they _would_ have sufficed: they cover
the scale.

[Illustration: Priory]

In regard, however, to the implications and explications of this
perfection of a village, primarily and to be just, Broadway is, more
than any one else. Mr. Frank Millet. Mr. Laurence Hutton discovered but
Mr. Mi