rse still, there was
no help for it but to submit like a dog. Had Ariel any excuses to make?
Nothing of the sort.

She turned her shapeless back on me and vanished into the kitchen region
of the house.

After waiting for a minute or two, and hearing no signal from the floor
above, I advanced into the broader and brighter part of the hall, to
look by daylight at the pictures which I had only imperfectly discovered
in the darkness of the night. A painted inscription in many colors,
just under the cornice of the ceiling, informed me that the works on the
walls were the production of the all-accomplished Dexter himself. Not
satisfied with being poet and composer, he was painter as well. On one
wall the subjects were described as "Illustrations of the Passions;"
on the other, as "Episodes in the Life of the Wandering Jew."
Chance speculators like myself were gravely warned, by means of the
inscription, to view the pictures as efforts of pure imagination.
"Persons who look for mere Nature in works of Art" (the inscription
announced) "are persons to whom Mr. Dexter does not address himself with
the brush. He relies entirely on his imagination. Nature puts him out."

Taking due care to dismiss all ideas of Nature from my mind, to begin
with, I looked at the pictures which represented the Passions first.

Little as I knew critically of Art, I could see that Miserrimus Dexter
knew still less of the rules of drawing, color, and composition. His
pictures were, in the strictest meaning of that expressive word, Daubs.
The diseased and riotous delight of the painter in representing
Horrors was (with certain exceptions to be hereafter mentioned) the one
remarkable quality that I could discover in the series of his works.

The first of the Passion pictures illustrated Revenge. A corpse, in
fancy costume, lay on the bank of a foaming river, under the shade of a
giant tree. An infuriated man, also in fancy costume, stood astride over
the dead body, with his sword lifted to the lowering sky, and watched,
with a horrid expression of delight, the blood of the man whom he had
just killed dripping slowly in a procession of big red drops down the
broad blade of his weapon. The next picture illustrated Cruelty, in many
compartments. In one I saw a disemboweled horse savagely spurred on
by his rider at a bull-fight. In another, an aged philosopher was
dissecting a living cat, and gloating over his work. In a third, two
pagans politely congra