and their champions are saying to-day.

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