to the ultra-subtle, but she procured for me a copy of Pickwick, by which I was instantly and gloriously enslaved.  My shouts of laughing at the richer passages were almost scandalous, and led to my being reproved for disturbing my Father while engaged, in an upper room, in the study of God’s Word.  I must have expended months on the perusal of Pickwick, for I used to rush through a chapter, and then read it over again very slowly, word for word, and then shut my eyes to realize the figures and the action.

I suppose no child will ever again enjoy that rapture of unresisting humorous appreciation of ‘Pickwick’.  I felt myself to be in the company of a gentleman so extremely funny that I began to laugh before he began to speak; no sooner did he remark ’the sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw,’ than I was in fits of hilarity.  My retirement in our sequestered corner of life made me, perhaps, even in this matter, somewhat old-fashioned, and possibly I was the latest of the generation who accepted Mr. Pickwick with an unquestioning and hysterical abandonment.  Certainly few young people now seem sensitive, as I was, and as thousands before me had been, to the quality of his fascination.

It was curious that living in a household where a certain delicate art of painting was diligently cultivated, I had yet never seen a real picture, and was scarcely familiar with the design of one in engraving.  My stepmother, however, brought a flavour of the fine arts with her; a kind of aesthetic odour, like that of lavender, clung to her as she moved.  She had known authentic artists in her youth; she had watched Old Crome painting, and had taken a course of drawing-lessons from no less a person than Cotman.  She painted small watercolour landscapes herself, with a delicate economy of means and a graceful Norwich convention; her sketch-books were filled with abbeys gently washed in, river-banks in sepia by which the elect might be dimly reminded of Liber Studiorum, and woodland scenes over which the ghost of Creswick had faintly breathed.  It was not exciting art, but it was, so far as it went, in its lady-like reserve, the real thing.  Our sea-anemones, our tropic birds, our bits of spongy rock filled and sprayed with corallines, had been very conscientious and skilful, but, essentially, so far as art was concerned, the wrong thing.

Thus I began to acquire, without understanding the value of it, some conception of the elegant phases of early English watercolour painting, and there was one singular piece of a marble well brimming with water, and a greyish-blue sky over it, and dark-green poplars, shaped like wet brooms, menacing the middle distance, which Cotman himself had painted; and this seemed beautiful and curious to me in its dim, flat frame, when it was hoisted to a place on our drawing-room wall.