ern he has devised,
suitably covered, and a clavecin. Our old silver candlesticks look well
on the chimney-piece. Odd, faint-coloured flowers fill coquettishly the
little empty spaces here and there, like ghosts of nosegays left by
visitors long ago, which paled thus, sympathetically, at the decease of
their old owners; for, in spite of its new-fashionedness, all this
array is really less like a new thing than the last surviving result of
all the more lightsome adornments of past times. Only, the very walls
seem to cry out:--No! to make delicate insinuation, for a music, a
conversation, nimbler than any we have known, or are likely to find
here. For himself, he converses well, but very sparingly. He assures
us, indeed, that the "new style" is in truth a thing of old days, of
his own old days here in Valenciennes, when, working long hours as a
mason's boy, he in fancy reclothed the walls of this or that house he
was employed in, with this fairy arrangement--itself like a piece of
"chamber-music," methinks, part answering to part; while no too
trenchant note is allowed to break through the delicate harmony of
white and pale red and little golden touches. Yet it is all very
comfortable also, it must be confessed; with an elegant open place for
the fire, instead of the big old stove of brown tiles. The ancient,
heavy furniture of our grandparents goes up, with difficulty, into the
garrets, much against my father's inclination. To reconcile him to the
change, Antony is painting his portrait in a vast perruque and with
more vigorous massing of light and shadow than he is wont to permit
himself.

June 1714.

He has completed the ovals:--The Four Seasons. Oh! the summerlike
grace, the freedom and softness, of the "Summer"--a hayfield such as we
visited to-day, but boundless, and with touches of level Italian
architecture in the hot, white, elusive distance, and wreaths of
flowers, fairy hayrakes and the like, suspended from tree to tree, with
that wonderful lightness which is one of the charms of his work. I can
understand through this, at last, what it is he enjoys, what he selects
by preference, from all that various world we pass our lives in. I am
struck by the purity of the room he has re-fashioned for us--a sort of
MORAL purity; yet, in the FORMS and COLOURS of things. Is the actual
life of Paris, to which he will soon return, equally pure, that it
relishes this kind of thing so strongly? Only, methinks 'tis a pity to