her grandfather’s epoch, have shone unambiguously as carrots.  The girl of his day thus adorned by Nature, would have been shown wearing her ridiculous crown with some decent sulkiness; and we should not have had her so unsparingly crowned; the truth would have been told in a dexterous concealment—­a rope of it wound up for a bed of the tortoise-shell comb behind, and a pair of tight cornucopias at the temples.  What does our modern artist do but flare it to right and left, lift it wavily over her forehead, revel in the oriental superabundance, and really seem to swear we shall admire it, against our traditions of the vegetable, as a poetical splendour.  The head of the heiress is in a Jovian shower.  Marigolds are in her hand.  The whole square of canvas is like a meadow on the borders of June.  It causes blinking.

Her brother also is presented:  a fine portrait of him, with clipped red locks, in blue array, smiling, wearing the rose of briny breezes, a telescope under his left arm, his right forefinger on a map, a view of Spitzbergen through a cabin-window:  for John had notions about the north-west passage, he had spent a winter in the ice, and if an amateur, was not the less a true sailor.

With his brass-buttoned blue coat, and his high coloured cheeks, and his convict hair—­a layer of brickdust—­and his air of princely wealth, and the icebergs and hummocks about him, he looks for adventure without a thought of his heroism—­the country all over.

There he stands, a lover of the sea, and a scientific seaman and engineer to boot, practical in every line of his face, defying mankind to suspect that he cherishes a grain of romance.  On the wall, just above his shoulder, is a sketch of a Viking putting the lighted brand to his ship in mid sea, and you are to understand that his time is come and so should a Viking die:  further, if you will, the subject is a modern Viking, ready for the responsibilities of the title.  Sketches of our ancient wooden walls and our iron and plated defences line the panellings.  These degenerate artists do work hard for their money.

The portrait of John’s father, dated a generation back, is just the man and little else, phantomly the man.  His brown coat struggles out of the obscurity of the background, but it is chiefly background clothing him.  His features are distinguishable and delicate:  you would suppose him appearing to you under the beams of a common candle, or cottage coalfire—­ferruginously opaque.  The object of the artist (apart from the triumph of tone on the canvas) is to introduce him as an elegant and faded gentleman, rather retiring into darkness than emerging.  He is the ghost of the painter’s impasto.  Yet this is Ezra Mattock, who multipled the inheritance of the hundreds of thousands into millions, and died, after covering Europe, Asia, and the Americas with iron rails, one of the few Christians that can hold up their heads beside the banking Jew as magnates in the lists of