e Mason,--a picture of a
girl driving calves on a windy hill, amid a perfect embarrassment of
such artistic riches. The famous Corots, a sequence of panels,
representing _Morning_, _Noon_, _Evening_, and _Night_, which cost Lord
Leighton less than 1,000 francs each, were sold for 6,000 guineas for
the four, at Christie's, in July, 1896. Still another small Corot, a
picture of a boat afloat on a still lake, was also in this room. One of
the Constables that hung there is literally historic--for it is the
sketch for that famous _Hay Wain_ which, exhibited in Paris, at once
upset the classical tradition, and gave impetus to the whole modern
school of French landscape. Near it was one of Constable's many pictures
of Hampstead Heath,--simply a bit of dark heath against a sympathetic
sky; but so painted as to be a masterpiece of its kind. These pictures
were but a few of the many artfully disposed things of beauty, born in
older Italy, or newer France, or in our new-old London.

Upon the staircase there were pictures at every turn to make one pause,
step by step, on the way. Sir Joshua Reynolds was represented by an
unfinished canvas of Lord Rockingham, in which the great Burke, in his
minor function of secretary, also figures. Then came G. F. Watts's
earlier portrait of Leighton himself; and here a genuine Tintoretto.
There was the P.R.A.'s famous _Portrait of Captain Burton_; and over a
doorway his early painting of _The Plague at Florence_, with another
early work, _Romeo and Juliet_, one of his very few Shakespearean
pictures.

From the landing whence most of these things were visible, you entered
at once the great studio. Round the upper wall ran a cast of the
Parthenon frieze, and beneath this the wall on one side was riddled and
windowed, as it were, with innumerable framed pictures, small studies of
foreign scenes; so that one looked out in turn upon Italy and the South,
Egypt and the East, or upon an Irish sunset, or a Scottish
mountain-side.

Opposite these, below the great window, were many of the artist's
miniature wax models and studies. Else, the ordinary not unpicturesque
lumber of an artist's studio was conspicuously absent. The secret of
Leighton's despatch and careful ordering of his days, was to be read,
indeed, in every detail of his work-a-day surroundings. Even in a dim
antechamber, with a trellised niche most mysteriously overlooking the
Arab Hall, at one end of the studio, in which the curious visito