es,' said Fan, gleefully; 'go out, Len, or you will never be able
to endure Harry afterward, for your counterpart will be peeping out, and
then woe to your pride!'

'No danger,' said Henrietta, '_that's_ perfectly invulnerable. Lenox may
remain; it will be a wholesome discipline for him--a warning, you know,
my hero; although, girls, Lenox is tolerably faultless,

'Little _he_ loves but a Frau or a feast,
Little he fears but a protest or priest.'

Praed altered. Sit down, disciple, at my feet if you will; I am in the
oratorical mood to-day. Hypatia, if you please, _not_ Grace the Less.'

There was a pretty picture of the _Immaculee Conception_ over the sofa,
one of those lithographs that you see in every bookstore, that Bertha
fancied because it was 'sweet.' The Virgin, a woman with a child-angel's
face, and the mezzo-luna beneath her feet. That artist knew what he was
about, sir. I'd give more for a picture with a good, deep idea, boldly
launched forth, than for a thousand of your smiling, proper, natural
'studies,' and Bridal Scenes, and Dramatic or Historical Snatches. If
artists, now, were all poets and scholars, as they should be, it would
be the work and delirious rapture of a life to go through a gallery as
large as our Dusseldorf. Men would go there to write novels and
histories, and women to learn to be good and beautiful--that is, to
learn to think. Oh, what a school for great and small! But when is this
new era of the real and the true in art to begin? You boy artists, who
are just opening glad eyes to the glorious light, the great world looks
to _you_ to inaugurate the new, to pour ancient lore and mystic symbols
and grand old art into the waiting crucible, and melt the whole, with
your burning, creative genius, into forms and conceptions before which,
hearts shall be silent in very rapture. But the time is not yet. One
here and there cannot change the Iron to a Golden Age, and it is to
thoughts rather than their great embodiments that earnest
art-worshippers now bow. And yet men fancy they are artists, dream of a
fame glorious as that of Phidias! Why there's young Acajou, who
chiselled a very respectable hound out of a stray lump of marble,
stealthily, by a candle, or more probably a spirit lamp, in his father's
cellar--was discovered and straightway heroized. I don't say the boy
hasn't talent, genius if you will; but it isn't the genius that will
overflow his soul and etherealize his whole nature.