lk about the respectability of commercial
pursuits. I don't want to be respectable, and I hate commercial
pursuits. What is the good of forcing me into a merchant's office, when
I can't say my Multiplication table? Ask my mother about that: _she'll_
tell you! Only fancy me going round tea warehouses in filthy Jewish
places like St. Mary-Axe, to take samples, with a blue bag to carry them
about in; and a dirty junior clerk, who cleans his pen in his hair, to
teach me how to fold up parcels! Isn't it enough to make my blood boil
to think of it? I can't go on, and I won't go on in this way! Mind
you're at home to-morrow; I'm coming to speak to you about how I'm to
begin learning to be an artist. The junior clerk is going to do all
my sampling work for me in the morning; and we are to meet in the
afternoon, after I have come away from you, at a chop-house; and then
go back to the office as if we had been together all day, just as usual.
Ever yours, Z. THORPE, JUN.--P. S. My mind's made up: if the worst comes
to the worst, I shall leave home."

"Oh, dear me! oh, dear! dear me!" says Valentine, mournfully rubbing his
palette clean with a bit of rag. "What will it all end in, I wonder. Old
Thorpe's going just the way, with his obstinate severity, to drive Zack
to something desperate. Coming here to-morrow, he says?" continues Mr.
Blyth, approaching the smallest of the two pictures, placed on easels at
opposite extremities of the room. "Coming to-morrow! He never dates
his notes; but I suppose, as this one came last night, to-morrow means
to-day."

Saying these words with eyes absently fixed on his picture, Valentine
withdraws the sheet stretched over the canvas, and discloses a Classical
Landscape of his own composition.

If Mr. Blyth had done nothing else in producing the picture which now
confronted him, he had at least achieved one great end of all Classic
Art, by reminding nobody of anything simple, familiar, or pleasing to
them in nature. In the foreground of his composition, were the three
lanky ruined columns, the dancing Bacchantes, the musing philosopher,
the mahogany-colored vegetation, and the bosky and branchless trees,
with which we have all been familiar, from our youth upwards, in
"classical compositions." Down the middle of the scene ran that
wonderful river, which is always rippling with the same regular waves;
and always bearing onward the same capsizable galleys, with the same
vermilion and blue reveler