design a sentiment which was entirely lacking in the English figure painting of that day.  He painted in both oil and water-color, with a facility of design I have never known surpassed, making at a single sitting, and without a model, a drawing with many figures.  He was at the moment I knew him engaged in illustrating Grimm’s stories, for a paltry compensation, but, as it seemed to me, in a spirit the most completely concordant with the stories of all the illustrations I have ever seen of that folk-lore.

Wehnert had several sisters, who had been accustomed to a certain ease in life, and to maintain this all his efforts and those of a bachelor brother were devoted, to the sacrifice of his legitimate ambitions; he was overworked with the veriest hack-work of his profession, and I never knew him but as a jaded man.  He was a graduate of Goettingen, widely read and well taught in all that related to his art as well as in literature, and I used to sit much with him while he worked, and most of my evenings were passed in the family.  The sisters were women who had been of the world, clever, accomplished, and with a restricted and most interesting circle of friends; but over the whole family there rested an air of tragic gravity, as if of some past which could never be spoken of and into which I never felt inclined to inquire.  Among the memories of my first stay in London the Wehnerts awaken the tenderest, for through many years they proved the dearest and kindest of friends.  And the hospitality of London, wherever I found access to it, was unmeasured—­the kindly feeling which showed itself to a young and unknown student without recommendation or achievement made on me an indelible impression.  I now and then found people who asked me where I had learned to speak English, or if all the people in the section from which I came were as white as I was; but except in a single case, that of a lady who proposed to make me responsible for slavery in the United States, I never found anything but friendship and courtesy, and generally the friendliness took the form of active interest.

Most of my time was passed in hunting up pictures by Turner, and of course I made the early acquaintance of Griffiths, a dealer in pictures, who was Turner’s special agent, and at whose gallery were to be seen such of his pictures as he wished to sell,—­for no inducement could be offered which would make him dispose of some of them.  Griffiths told me that in his presence an American collector, James Lenox, of New York, after offering Turner L5000, which was refused, for the Old “Temeraire,” offered him a blank check, which was also rejected.  Griffiths’s place became one of my most common resorts, for Griffiths was less a picture dealer than a passionate admirer of Turner, and seemed to have drifted into his business through his love for the artist’s pictures; and to share in his admiration for Turner was to gain his cordial friendship.