I found, moreover, the epithet ‘independent,’ to qualify an entertaining and significant exhibition, misleading.  For many of the items could only be so classified in the sense that they were independent of Messrs. Agnew and the Royal Academy.  Mr. Tonks and Professor Brown are official instructors at the Slade School in London; Mr. C. J. Holmes is Keeper of the National Portrait Gallery.  Mr. Gerard Chowne was a professor at Liverpool.  Mr. Fry is now an official at New York; and the majority of the painters belonged to two distinctive and dependent groups—­the Glasgow School and the New English Art Club.  Intense individualism is not incompatible with militant collectivism.  The only independent artists, if you except Mr. Nicholson, were Mr. C. H. Shannon and Mr. Charles Ricketts, who have always stood apart, being neither for the Royal Academy nor its enemies; their choice is in their pictures.

I feel it difficult to write of painters for some of whom I acted showman so long at the Carfax Gallery.  I confess that when I heard they were going to Bond Street my pangs were akin to those of the owner of a small country circus on learning that his troupe of performing dogs had been engaged by Mr. Imre Kiralfy or the Hippodrome.  A quondam dealer in ultramontanes, I became an Othello of the trade.  And in their grander quarters (I grieve to say) they looked better than ever, though I would have chosen another background, something less expensive and more severe.  Yes, they all went through their hoops gracefully.  With one exception, I never saw finer Wilson Steers; the ‘Sunset’ might well be hung beside the new Turners, when the gulf between ancient and modern art would be almost imperceptible.  The ‘Aliens’ of Mr. Rothenstein in the cosmopolitan society of a public picture gallery would hardly appear foreigners, because they belong to a country where the inhabitants are racy of every one else’s soil.  When time has given an added dignity (if that were possible) to this work, I can realise how our descendants will laugh at our lachrymose observations on the decadence of art.  The background against which the stately Hebrew figures are silhouetted is in itself a liberal education for the aged and those who ask their friends what these modern fellows mean.

When the inhabitants of the unceltiferous portion of these islands employ the adjective un-English you may be sure there is something serious on the carpet.  It is valedictory, expressive of sorrow and contempt rather than anger.  All the other old favourites of vituperative must have missed fire before this almost sacred, disqualifying Podsnappianism is applied to the objectionable person, picture, book, behaviour, or movement.  And when the epithet is brought into action, in nine cases out of ten it is aimed at some characteristic essentially, often blatantly, Anglo-Saxon.  Throughout the nineteenth century all exponents of art and literature not conforming