Old fashions in literature are not so pleasant as old fashions in dress.  I like the costume of the age of powder better than the poetry of the age of Pope.  But if one adopts the historical standpoint—­and this is, indeed, the only standpoint from which we can ever form a fair estimate of work that is not absolutely of the highest order—­we cannot fail to see that many of the English poetesses who preceded Mrs. Browning were women of no ordinary talent, and that if the majority of them looked upon poetry simply as a department of belles lettres, so in most cases did their contemporaries.  Since Mrs. Browning’s day our woods have become full of singing birds, and if I venture to ask them to apply themselves more to prose and less to song, it is not that I like poetical prose, but that I love the prose of poets.

LONDON MODELS

(English Illustrated Magazine, January 1889.)

Professional models are a purely modern invention.  To the Greeks, for instance, they were quite unknown.  Mr. Mahaffy, it is true, tells us that Pericles used to present peacocks to the great ladies of Athenian society in order to induce them to sit to his friend Phidias, and we know that Polygnotus introduced into his picture of the Trojan women the face of Elpinice, the celebrated sister of the great Conservative leader of the day, but these grandes dames clearly do not come under our category.  As for the old masters, they undoubtedly made constant studies from their pupils and apprentices, and even their religious pictures are full of the portraits of their friends and relations, but they do not seem to have had the inestimable advantage of the existence of a class of people whose sole profession is to pose.  In fact the model, in our sense of the word, is the direct creation of Academic Schools.

Every country now has its own models, except America.  In New York, and even in Boston, a good model is so great a rarity that most of the artists are reduced to painting Niagara and millionaires.  In Europe, however, it is different.  Here we have plenty of models, and of every nationality.  The Italian models are the best.  The natural grace of their attitudes, as well as the wonderful picturesqueness of their colouring, makes them facile—­often too facile—­subjects for the painter’s brush.  The French models, though not so beautiful as the Italian, possess a quickness of intellectual sympathy, a capacity, in fact, of understanding the artist, which is quite remarkable.  They have also a great command over the varieties of facial expression, are peculiarly dramatic, and can chatter the argot of the atelier as cleverly as the critic of the Gil Bias.  The English models form a class entirely by themselves.  They are not so picturesque as the Italian, nor so clever as the French, and they have absolutely no tradition, so to speak, of their order.  Now and then some old veteran knocks at