st must reach its highest
temperature. However, the holidays are beginning, the working season is
over, and that reflection, doubtless, helps the weary painter through his
ordeal. But his friends also have to bear a good deal if they happen not
to like his performances. They must feign admiration as well as they
may, and the sun of Show Sunday goes down on a world rather glad that it
is well over.

Lord Beaconsfield once said at an Academy dinner that originality was the
great characteristic of English art. So little was he supposed to have
spoken seriously that another, of whose ceasing to perorate there is no
prospect, characterized his criticism in language so strong that it
cannot well be repeated. Let us admit that Lord Beaconsfield was either
mistaken, or that, like the Consul Aulus, "he spake a bitter jest." Our
artists, when they have found their vein, go on working it. They do not
wander off in search of new veins, as a general rule. It would be unkind
to draw attention to personal proofs of this truism. He who has done
well with babies in fancy dresses will go on doing well with infants in
masquerade. There are moments when the arrival of Cronus to swallow the
whole family of painted babes, as he did his own, would be not unwelcome;
when an artistic Herod would be applauded for a general massacre of the
Burlington House innocents. But this may be only the jaundiced theory of
a jaded critic. The mothers of England are a much more important set of
judges, and they like the babies. Then the bishops, though a little
monotonous, must be agreeable to their flocks; while the hunting dogs,
and pugs, and kittens, and monks, and Venetian girls--_la blonde et la
brune_--and the Highland rivers of the colour of porter "with a head on
it," and the mackerel-hued sea, and the marble, and the martyrs, and the
Mediterranean--they are all dear to various classes of our teeming
population. The critic may say he has seen them all before, he knows
them off by heart; but then so does he know Raphael's infants, and
Botticelli's madonnas, and Fra Angelico's angel trumpeters, and Vecelli's
blue hills, and Robusti's doges, and Lionardo's smiling, enigmatic
ladies. He does not say he is tired of these, but that is only his
eternal affectation. He is afraid, perhaps, to say that the old masters
bore him--that is a compliment reserved for contemporaries. Let it be
admitted that in all ages artists have had their grooves, l