of repose was rather recalled afterwards than felt at the time.  The alloy to this charm was a slight coarseness of voice and accent, which contrasted somewhat strangely with his constant courtesy and high breeding.  Perhaps this was characteristic.  A defect of some sort pervades his pictures.  Their great want is equality and congruity,—­that perfect union of qualities which we call taste.  His apartment, especially at that period when he lived in his painting-room, was in itself a study of the most picturesque kind.  Besides the great picture itself, for which there seemed hardly space between the walls, it was crowded with casts, lay figures, arms, tripods, vases, draperies, and costumes of all ages, weapons of all nations, books in all tongues.  These cumbered the floor; whilst around hung smaller pictures, sketches, and drawings, replete with originality and force.  With chalk he could do what he chose.  I remember he once drew for me a head of hair with nine of his sweeping, vigorous strokes!  Among the studies I remarked that day in his apartment was one of a mother who had just lost her only child,—­a most masterly rendering of an unspeakable grief.  A sonnet, which I could not help writing on this sketch, gave rise to our long correspondence, and to a friendship which never flagged.  Everybody feels that his life, as told by Mr. Taylor, with its terrible catastrophe, is a stern lesson to young artists, an awful warning that cannot be set aside.  Let us not forget that amongst his many faults are qualities which hold out a bright example.  His devotion to his noble art, his conscientious pursuit of every study connected with it, his unwearied industry, his love of beauty and of excellence, his warm family affection, his patriotism, his courage, and his piety, will not easily be surpassed.  Thinking of them, let us speak tenderly of the ardent spirit whose violence would have been softened by better fortune, and who, if more successful, would have been more gentle and more humble.”

And so with her vigilant and appreciative eye she saw, and thus in her own charming way she talked of, the man whose name, says Taylor, as a popularizer of art, stands without a rival among his brethren.

She loathed mere dandies, and there were no epithets too hot for her contempts in that direction.  Old beaux she heartily despised, and, speaking of one whom she had known, I remember she quoted with a fine scorn this appropriate passage from Dickens:  “Ancient, dandified men, those crippled invalides from the campaign of vanity, where the only powder was hair-powder, and the only bullets fancy balls.”

There was no half-way with her, and she never could have said with M——­ S——­, when a certain visitor left the room one day after a call, “If we did not love our dear friend Mr. ——­ so much, shouldn’t we hate him tremendously!” Her neighbor, John Ruskin, she thought as eloquent a prose-writer as Jeremy Taylor, and I have heard her go on in her fine way, giving preferences to certain modern poems far above the works of the great masters of song.  Pascal says that “the heart has reasons that reason does not know”; and Miss Mitford was a charming exemplification of this wise saying.