s interesting
enough to "develop" the peculiar turn of Marie's genius, by writing
for her plays about liberty, just as he would have written plays
about jealousy, or anything else for representing which she had
"capabilities." But to be called on to act in that Slavery question,
the one in which he knew (as all sensible Americans do) that the life
and death of his country depended, and which for that very reason he
had carefully ignored till a more convenient season, finding in
its very difficulty and danger an excuse for leaving it to solve
itself:--to have this thrust on him, and by her, as the price of the
thing which he must have, or die! If she had asked for his right hand,
he would have given it sooner; and he entered the Royal Academy that
day in much the same humour as that of a fine lady who should find
herself suddenly dragged from the ball-room into the dust-hole, in her
tenderest array of gauze and jewels, and there peremptorily compelled
to sift the cinders, under the superintendence of the sweep and the
pot-boy.

Glad to escape from questions which he had rather not answer too
soon, he went in search of Claude, and found him before one of those
pre-Raphaelite pictures, which Claude does not appreciate as he ought.

"Desinit in Culicem mulier formosa superne," said Stangrave, as he
looked over Claude's shoulder; "but I suppose he followed nature, and
copied his model."

"That he didn't," said Claude, "for I know who his model was: but if
he did he had no business to do so. I object on principle to these
men's notion of what copying nature means. I don't deny him talent.
I am ready to confess that there is more imagination and more honest
work in that picture than in any one in the room. The hysterical, all
but grinning joy upon the mother's face is a miracle of truth; I have
seen the expression more than once; doctors see it often, in the
sudden revulsion from terror and agony to certainty and peace; I only
marvel where he ever met it: but the general effect is unpleasing,
marred by patches of sheer ugliness, like that child's foot. There is
the same mistake in all his pictures. Whatever they are, they are not
beautiful; and no magnificence of surface-colouring will make up, in
my eyes, for wilful ugliness of form. I say that nature is beautiful;
and therefore nature cannot have been truly copied, or the general
effect would have been beautiful also. I never found out the fallacy
till the other day, whe