ngland and gaze at a lot
of pictures of entirely different schools in order to become a painter.
Gainsborough and our great Norwich artists evolved themselves without any
foreign study. There was no National Gallery in their days. A second-
rate Wynants and a doubtful Hobbema seem to have been enough to give them
hints. It would be tedious to mention other examples. The fortunate
meeting of Zuccarelli and Wilson at Venice is the only instance I know in
which foreign travel benefited any English landscape painter. Foreign
travel is all very well when the artist has grown up. Paris has been the
tomb of many English art students. M. Bordeaux, who gave Mr. Hind's hero
tips in the atelier, seems to have been as 'convincing' as the famous
barrel of the same name. Far better will the English student be under
Mr. Tonks at the Slade; or even at the Royal Academy, where, owing to the
doctrine of contraries, out of sheer rebellion he may become an artist.
In Paris you learn perfect carpentry, but not art, unless you are a born
artist; but in that case you will be one in spite of Paris, not because
of it. But if C. W. Shaw had been a real painter he would have seen at
Venice certain Tiepolos which seem to have escaped him, and in other
parts of Italy certain Caravaggios. Yes, and Correggios and Guido Renis,
too hastily passed by. He was doomed to be a connoisseur.

(1906.)

EGO ET MAX MEUS.

'How very delightful Max's drawings are. For all their mad perspective
and crude colour, they have, indeed, the sentiment of style, and they
reveal with rarer delicacy than does any other record the spirit of Lloyd-
George's day.' This sentence is not quite original: it is adapted from
an eminent author because the words sum up so completely the
inexpressible satisfaction following an inspection of Mr. Beerbohm's
caricatures. To-day essentially belongs to the Minister who once
presided at the Board of Trade. Several attempts indeed have been made
to describe the literature, art and drama of the present as 'Edwardian,'
from a very proper and loyal spirit, to which I should be the last to
object. We were even promised a few years ago a new style of furniture
to inaugurate the reign--something to supplant that Louis Dix-neuvieme
_decor_ which is merely a compromise with the past. But somehow the
whole thing has fallen through; in this democratic aeon the adjective
'Edwardian' trips on the tongue; our real dramatists are