piece, his favourite attitude when about to deliver his mind-to prescribe, as the lads called it. "That is just it. You are always coming to the root of the matter, but you never get there. You don't look in the right place for it, my boy; you, nor your friends. It is very well, and sounds very noble, to talk of the interests of English Art; but are you quite sure that each man by English Art does not mean his own? This man says an Academy ought to teach sculpture as well as painting; another pleads for architecture; a third for history and literature and the antiquities generally; and I have no doubt we shall get to Shakespeare and the musical glasses in time. Shall I give you a recipe for the disorder, an infallible recipe? Let the Academy build a dozen more big galleries and hang all the pictures sent in to them. Trust me, you'll hear no more then of a close corporation, and a private club, and vindictiveness, and the what-willsell standard. That's impossible, you say ? And do you suppose it will be possible for your National Exhibition to hang every picture sent in to them? And if not, do you suppose that the rejected will sit quietly down any more content to suffer and be still in the interests of English Art than they are now? If you do, you are a bigger fool than I take you for; and we none of us take you for a fool, Harry, even if we can't quite accept you at your own valuation. Mind you, I am not saying that the Academy is the best of all possible Academies, that all its painters are great artists, and all its laws unimpeachable. It would be very unlike any human institution the world has yet seen to be that. And I am quite willing to allow that some of your friend's. recommendations are much to the point as some at least of the Academicians, we know, are quite ready to acknowledge. But before we insist on our Reform bill, let us see who the Reformers are, and what is their bill. Who are your Reformers?

You talk of the root of the matter: now let us come to it. It is two-fold; one fibre you will find fast grounded in human nature; the other you must look for in the air, in the conditions, the spirit of the time-not a stable foundation for a root, is it? Who are

the men who have been throwing stones at the Academy?—it has been done before, mind you; you are not the first at that game, any more than you will be the last. They are the men who are unsuccessful, whose works do not sell, or have too small a sale to please either their pride or their pocket or they are the men who have worked their way to fortune through long hard years of neglect, or opposition and very possibly ridicule, and who cannot forget the past, cannot forget that men immeasurably their inferiors (as they think, and as their foolish friends tell them) found from the first primroses on the path which for them had nothing but thorns. This, you will say, is a brutal way of putting it; perhaps, but it is the true way; and at least you are not the men to cry out till you have filed your own tongues a little smoother. So much for your hoplites. Then with them comes a light-armed crowd, slingers and javelin-men, gathered from all quarters and enlisting from various motives. Some fight merely for the fun of the thing, always rushing, not angel-wise, into any newspaper fray; and some would gladly write themselves down ass for the sake of seeing their names in print; and some are of those who never lose a chance of flinging a stone at anything that is. This last is a very numerous sort to-day, and is largely recruited, I am sorry to say, from the class which calls itself artist the class which works with its hands if not with its head. There are far too many of the younger members of that class who have not learned to labour and will not wait. They demand a royal road to success (and, to be sure, the road does seem to have been very much levelled since I was young), and if

The

they do not find it they lift up their voices, not to weep but to curse. rallying cry of these fiery young spirits is Freedom, of course; but freedom from what? Freedom, they will tell you, from Convention, Routine, the deadly Upas-tree which spreads its branches over England and sucks the sap of her goodliest sons. Well and good; down with that tree, by all means; but be first quite sure that you have laid your axe to the right root. It's poor fun, my lad, to find too late that the dentist has made a mistake in the tooth. This same Convention is a mighty convenient rallying-cry for the Great Unappreciated. It is a wondrous consolation to believe that the public will not buy your work because you are too great a genius; and it is a wondrous easy way of becoming a genius to do everything as nobody else does it. There is a sort of folk about who would grow like toadstools if they could rather than be born as their fathers were born before them. Now, if you press the question home, you will find that this same Routine, or Convention, is with these young geniuses a word

as

comprehensive and all-embracing as Lord Burleigh's nod. Anything which stands in their way is Convention: anything which is, and in the creating and shaping of which they had no voice, is Routine. Whatsoever the custom, convenience, or common sense of the world prescribes or sanctions, from the Sabbath to a dress-coat, and from a black hat to the British Constitution, at it they go pell-mell as a bull is popularly supposed to go at a red rag, or as an Irish Member of Parliament goes at the Estimates. The whole mechanism of life must be altered to suit their convenience; the world has been rolling round one way long enough; it is time for a fresh departure. The written laws they are not yet strong enough to alter, and besides the work of alteration on that side is apt to be troublesome and a little dangerous, and danger and trouble are not at all

to their taste. But those that are unwritten afford a fine field for their reforming talents. Nature and humanity shall be looked at with other eyes than their humdrum fathers were content to use; and words and things shall have a meaning not dreamed of in the old philosophy. Foul shall be fair, and fair foul; Art shall be stewed in hell-broth; a dung-hill shall be a flower-garden, and our Lady of Grace discrowned for our Lady of Pain."

are

"My dear Doctor," said Merton, as the speaker stopped a moment for breath and refreshment, 66 you most surprisingly eloquent to-night, but have you not, may I say it? got a little off the path?"

"No, Sir, I have not," the Doctor replied. "There are many travellers on that path, old and young. I am talking just now to the latter-a flock of silly geese whom every Theudas can whistle away into the wilderness to fatten for his own eating! Don't think I am set on crying nothing but stinking fish, or wish to praise the past times at the expense of these. There are plenty of fine young fellows about now, and there were plenty of foolish young fellows about when the world and I were younger. It is not wise, we know, to inquire whether the former days were better than these: but it is wise to inquire whether these are good, and if not, wherein lies the badness. I do say that the worst note of you youngsters is this impatience, this scorn of the fathers who bore you. Any one who will give you a stone or a handful of mud to fling at their monuments is the man for your money. You think that reading and writing come by nature, and when any one older than yourselves warns you of your mistake, you toss your heads and cry Philistine. Philistine! I am sick of that cant. The man who first taught Englishmen that cry did an evil deed. He is responsible for half the laziness, selfishness, vanity and folly of this generation. You paint bad pictures, and you write bad books

And

(bad too often in more ways than one), and then because the public (which is an ass, if you please, but in the main a sober well-conditioned ass) won't buy your work, instead of trying to do better, you turn to and rail at those who have found a market, and are content to sell therein such wares as it has pleased God to give them heads and hands to fashion. And who are the men with whom you are allying yourselves to whom you call to come over and help you? You talk of the Academy being a clique! Why these are the very men who have spilled their lives among the cliques; who have wasted all their years contending that black is white, and that two and two do not make four. If this admirable work of theirs is kept unjustly out of Burlington House, why do they not send it elsewhere? There are galleries enough and to spare which should, heaven knows, be glad enough to get it. And these are the men you rely on to form a sort of Co-operative

Paradise of Art, where the lions and the lambs shall lie down together, and the third-rate imitators of French brutality shall join hands with the young upstarts who decline to be hampered with such old-world banalities as perspective and right drawing, and all shall be forgivenesses of injuries and amicablenesses! A pretty sort of Home-Rule you are crying for! Ishould uncommonly like to be present, at a safe distance, at the first ballot of your Universal Artistic Suffrage! There I've done: I've put my pipe out and myself in a passion!"

Dick and Harry sat silent; but Merton, turning with a smile to Tom, said, "Well, my easy-going young friend, and what do you think of the Doctor's sermon?"

"I think," said Tom, "that he must be uncommon dry, and that I hear Flibbertigibbet with the oysters."

"Mon âne parle," murmured Merton, getting off the sofa, "et même il parle bien."

No. 324.-VOL. LIV.

H. H

CHAPTER XXIII.

WITH this in view Melbury took her out for a walk, a custom of his when he wished to say anything specially impressive. Their way was over the top of that lofty ridge dividing their woodland from the cider district, whence they had in the spring beheld the miles of apple-trees in bloom. All was now deep green. The spot recalled to Grace's mind the last occasion of her presence there, and she said, "The promise of an enormous apple-crop is fulfilling itself, is it not? I suppose Giles is getting his mills and presses ready."

This was just what her father had not come there to talk about. Without replying he raised his arm, and moved his finger till he fixed it at a point. "There," he said, "you see that plantation reaching over the hill like a great slug, and just behind the hill a particularly green sheltered bottom? That's where Mr. Fitzpiers's family were lords of the manor for I don't know how many hundred years, and there stands the village of Buckbury Fitzpiers. A wonderful property 'twas wonderful! "

"But they are not lords of the manor there now."

so? You say our name occurs in old deeds continually."

"Oh yes-as yeomen, copyholders and such like. But think how much better this will be for 'ee. You'll be living a high, perusing life, such as has now become natural to you; and though the doctor's practice is small here he'll no doubt go to a dashing town when he's got his hand in, and keep a stylish carriage, and you'll be brought to know a good many ladies of excellent society. If you should ever meet me then, Grace, you can drive past me, looking the other way. I shouldn't expect you to speak to me, or wish such a thing-unless it happened to be in some lonely private place where 'twouldn't lower ye at all. Don't think such men as neighbour Giles your equal. He and I shall be good friends enough, but he's not for the like of you. He's lived our rough

and homely life here, and his wife's life must be rough and homely likewise."

So much pressure could not but produce some displacement. As Grace was left very much to herself, she took advantage of one fine day before Fitzpiers's return to drive into the aforesaid vale where stood the village of Buckbury Fitzpiers. Leaving her father's man at the inn with the horse and gig, she rambled onwards to the ruins of a castle, which stood in a field hard by. She had no doubt that it represented the ancient stronghold of the Fitzpiers family.

The remains were few, and consisted mostly of remnants of the lower vaulting, supported on low stout columns surmounted by the crochet capital of the period. The two or three arches

of these vaults that were still in position had been utilised by the adjoining farmer as shelter for his calves, the floor being spread with straw, amid which the young creatures rustled, cooling their thirsty tongues by licking the quaint Norman carving, which glistened with the moisture. It was a degradation of even such a rude form of art as this to be treated so grossly, she thought, and for the first time the family of Fitzpiers assumed in her imagination the hues of a melancholy romanticism.

It was soon time to drive home, and she traversed the distance with a preoccupied mind. The idea of so modern a man in science and æsthetics as the young surgeon springing out of relics so ancient was a kind of novelty she had never before experienced. The combination lent him a social and intellectual interest which she dreaded, so much weight did it add to the strange influence he exercised upon her whenever he came near her.

In an excitement which was not love, not ambition, rather a fearful consciousness of hazard in the air, she awaited his return.

Meanwhile her father was awaiting him also. In his house there was an old work on medicine, published towards the end of the last century, and to put himself in harmony with events Melbury spread this work on his knees when he had done his day's business, and read about Galen, Hippocrates, and Herophilus; of the dogmatic, the empiric, the hermetical, and other sects of practitioners that have arisen in history; and thence proceeded to the classification of maladies and the rules for their treatment, as laid down in this valuable book with absolute precision. Melbury regretted that the treatise was so old, fearing that he might in consequence be unable to hold as complete a conversation as he could wish with Mr. Fitzpiers, primed, no doubt, with more recent discoveries.

The day of Fitzpiers's return arrived, and he sent to say that he would call immediately. In the little

time that was afforded for putting the house in order the sweeping of Melbury's parlour was as the sweeping of the parlour at the Interpreter's which well-nigh choked the Pilgrim. At the end of it Mrs. Melbury sat down, folded her hands and lips, and waited. Her husband restlessly walked in and out from the timber-yard, stared at the interior of the room, jerked out "ay, ay," and retreated again. Between four and five Fitzpiers arrived, hitching his horse to the hook outside the door.

As soon as he had walked in and perceived that Grace was not in the room, he seemed to have a misgiving. Nothing less than her actual presence could long keep him to the level of this impassioned enterprise, and that lacking he appeared as one who wished to retrace his steps.

He mechanically talked at what he considered a woodland matron's level of thought till a rustling was heard on the stairs, and Grace came in. Fitzpiers was for once as agitated as she. Over and above the genuine emotion which she raised in his heart there hung the sense that he was casting a die by impulse which he might not have thrown by judgment.

Mr. Melbury was not in the room. Having to attend to matters in the yard, he had delayed putting on his afternoon coat and waistcoat till the doctor's appearance, when, not wishing to be backward in receiving him, he entered the parlour hastily buttoning up those garments. Grace's fastidiousness was a little distressed that Fitzpiers should see by this action the strain his visit was putting upon her father; and to make matters worse for her just then, old Grammer seemed to have a passion for incessantly pumping in the back kitchen, leaving the doors open so that the banging and splashing were distinct above the parlour conversation.

Whenever the chat over the 'tea sank into pleasant desultoriness Mr. Melbury broke in with speeches of laboured precision on very remote