And to-day I went down-stairs (to prove how my promises stand) though I could find at least ten good excuses for remaining in my own room, for our cousin, Sam Barrett, who brought the interruption yesterday and put me out of humour (it wasn’t the fault of the dear little cousin, Lizzie ... my ‘portrait’ ... who was ‘so sorry,’ she said, dear child, to have missed Papa somewhere on the stairs!) the cousin who should have been in Brittany yesterday instead of here, sate in the drawing-room all this morning, and had visitors there, and so I had excellent excuses for never moving from my chair.  Yet, the field being clear at half-past two!  I went for half an hour, just—­just for you.  Did you think of me, I wonder?  It was to meet your thoughts that I went, dear dearest.

How clever these sketches are.  The expression produced by such apparently inadequate means is quite striking; and I have been making my brothers admire them, and they ’wonder you don’t think of employing them in an illustrated edition of your works.’  Which might be, really!  Ah, you did not ask for ‘Luria’!  Not that I should have let you have it!—­I think I should not indeed.  Dearest, you take care of the head ... and don’t make that tragedy of the soul one for mine, by letting it make you ill.  Beware too of the shower-bath—­it plainly does not answer for you at this season.  And walk, and think of me for your good, if such a combination should be possible.

And I think of you ... if I do not of Italy.  Yet I forget to speak to you of the Dulwich Gallery.  I never saw those pictures, but am astonished that the whole world should be wrong in praising them.  ‘Divine’ is a bad word for Murillo in any case—­because he is intensely human in his most supernatural subjects.  His beautiful Trinity in the National Gallery, which I saw the last time I went out to look at pictures, has no deity in it—­and I seem to see it now.  And do you remember the visitation of the angels to Abraham (the Duke of Sutherland’s picture—­is it not?) where the mystic visitors look like shepherds who had not even dreamt of God?  But I always understood that that Dulwich Gallery was famous for great works—­you surprise me!  And for painters ... their badness is more ostentatious than that of poets—­they stare idiocy out of the walls, and set the eyes of sensitive men on edge.  For the rest, however, I very much doubt whether they wear their lives more to rags, than writers who mistake their vocation in poetry do.  There is a mechanism in poetry as in the other art—­and, to men not native to the way of it, it runs hard and heavily.  The ‘cudgelling of the brain’ is as good labour as the grinding of the colours, ... do you not think?