“Decidedly, madam; on reflection, however, as I value my eyesight, I must except Homer and Milton.”

“But have you not determined to which of the muses you will throw the handkerchief?”

“I thought of music at first.  It must be a grand thing, said I to myself, that can charm, delight, and draw tears from the eyes of the multitude—­that can inspire faith, courage, patriotism, devotion and energy, and that, too, by means of little black dots with tails, interspersed with quavers, crotchets, sharps and flats.”

“Have you composed a sonata yet?”

“No, madam; I was going to do so, but it occurred to me that I should require an orchestra to play it.”

“And not having that, you abandoned the idea?”

“Exactly, madam.  I then turned to poetry.  That is an art fit for the gods; it puts you on a level with kings, and makes you in history even more illustrious than them.  You ascend the capitol, and there you are crowned with laurel, like the hero of a hundred fights.”

“What is the subject of your principal work in this line?”

“Well, madam, I once finished a verse, and was going on with a second, but, somehow or other, I could not get the words to rhyme.”

“Then it occurred to you that you had neither a printer nor readers, and you broke your lyre?”

“I was about to reproach you, Master Jack,” said Wolston, “for undertaking too many things at once; but I see the ranks are beginning to thin.”

“Beautiful as poetry may be,” continued Jack, one gets tired of reading and re-reading one’s own effusions.”

“It is even often intensely insipid the very first time,” remarked Mrs. Wolston.

“There still remains painting,” continued Jack.  “Painting is vastly superior to either music or poetry.  In the first place, it requires no interpreter between itself and the public;—­what, for example, remains of a melody after a concert? nothing but the recollection.  Poesy may excite admiration in the retirement of one’s chamber; your nostrils are, as it were, reposing on the bouquet, though often you have still a difficulty in smelling anything.  But if once you give life to canvas, it is eternal.”

“Eternal is scarcely the proper word,” remarked Wolston:  “the celebrated fresco of Leonardo da Vinci, in the refectory of the Dominicans at Milan, is nothing but a confused mass of colors and figures.”

“I answer that by saying that the painting in question is only a fresco.  Besides, I use the word eternal in a modified or relative sense.  A painting is preserved from generation to generation, whilst its successive races of admirers are mingled with the dust.  Then suppose a painter in his studio; he cannot look around him without awakening some memory of the past.  He can associate with those he loves when they are absent, nay, even when they are dead, and they always remain young and beautiful as when he first delineated them.”