The scene had been described with humanely-moralising pathos in the various books of stories of Men who have come to Fortune, and it had for a length of seasons an annual position in the foremost rank (on the line, facing the door) in our exhibition of the chosen artists, where, as our popular words should do, it struck the spectator’s eye and his brain simultaneously with pugilistic force:  a reference to the picture in the catalogue furnishing a recapitulation of the incident.  ’I’ve worked a good bit in my time, gentlemen, and I baint done yet’:—­See professor SUMMIT’S ‘men who have come to fortune.’  There is, we perceive at a glance, a contrast in the bowed master of the Mansion applying to his menials for a day’s work at the rate of pay to able-bodied men:—­which he is not, but the deception is not disingenuous.  The contrast flashed with the rapid exchange of two prizefighters in a ring, very popularly.  The fustian suit and string below the knee, on the one side, and the purple plush breeches and twinkling airy calves (fascinating his attention as he makes his humble request to his own, these domestic knights) to right and left of the doorway and in front, hit straight out of the canvas.  And as quickly as you perceive the contrast you swallow the moral.  The dreaded thing is down in a trice, to do what salutary work it may within you.  That it passed into the blood of England’s middle-class population, and set many heads philosophically shaking, and filled the sails of many a sermon, is known to those who lived in days when Art and the classes patronising our Native Art existed happily upon the terms of venerable School-Dame and studious pupils, before the sickly era displacing Exhibitions full of meaning for tricks of colour, monstrous atmospherical vagaries that teach nothing, strange experiments on the complexion of the human face divine—­the feminine hyper-aethereally.  Like the first John Mattock, it was formerly of, and yet by dint of sturdy energy, above the people.  They learnt from it; they flocked to it thirsting and retired from it thoughtful, with some belief of having drunk of nature in art, as you will see the countless troops of urchins about the one cow of London, in the Great City’s Green Park.

A bequest to the nation of the best of these pictures of Old John, by a very old Yorkshire collector, makes it milk for all time, a perpetual contrast, and a rebuke.  Compared with the portrait of Jane Mattock in her fiery aureole of hair on the walls of the breakfast-room, it marks that fatal period of degeneracy for us, which our critics of Literature as well as Art are one voice in denouncing, when the complex overwhelms the simple, and excess of signification is attempted, instead of letting plain nature speak her uncorrupted tongue to the contemplative mind.  Degeneracy is the critical history of the Arts.  Jane’s hair was of a reddish gold-inwoven cast that would, in