no more
nonsense. Let the honest fellow, he says, on his return from his
counting-house tear down the Persian hangings, put a chop on the
Anatolian plate, mix some toddy in the Venetian glass, and carry his wife
off to the National Gallery to look at 'our own Mulready'! And then the
picture he draws of the ideal home, where everything, though ugly, is
hallowed by domestic memories, and where beauty appeals not to the
heartless eye but the family affections; 'baby's chair there, and the
mother's work-basket . . . near the fire, and the ornaments Fred brought
home from India on the mantel-board'! It is really impossible not to be
touched by so charming a description. How valuable, also, in connection
with house decoration is Sententia No. 351, 'There is nothing furnishes a
room like a bookcase, _and plenty of books in it_.' How cultivated the
mind that thus raises literature to the position of upholstery and puts
thought on a level with the antimacassar!

And, finally, for the young workers in art Mr. Quilter has loud words of
encouragement. With a sympathy that is absolutely reckless of grammar,
he knows from experience 'what an amount of study and mental strain _are_
involved in painting a bad picture honestly'; he exhorts them (Sententia
No. 267) to 'go on quite bravely and sincerely making mess after mess
from Nature,' and while sternly warning them that there is something
wrong if they do not 'feel _washed out_ after each drawing,' he still
urges them to 'put a new piece of goods in the window' every morning. In
fact, he is quite severe on Mr. Ruskin for not recognising that 'a
picture should denote the frailty of man,' and remarks with pleasing
courtesy and felicitous grace that 'many phases of feeling . . . are as
much a dead letter to this great art teacher, as Sanskrit to an Islington
cabman.' Nor is Mr. Quilter one of those who fails to practice what he
preaches. Far from it. He goes on quite bravely and sincerely making
mess after mess from literature, and misquotes Shakespeare, Wordsworth,
Alfred de Musset, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Fitzgerald's
Rubaiyat, in strict accordance with Sententia No. 251, which tells us
that 'Work must be abominable if it is ever going to be good.' Only,
unfortunately, his own work never does get good. Not content with his
misquotations, he misspells the names of such well-known painters as
Madox-Brown, Bastien Lepage and Meissonier, hesitates between Ing