so I will tell you that he has a large house
with a lodge, and a valet and footman and coachman, and grand rooms
glittering with pictures, chiefly Turner's, and that his father and
mother live with him, or he with them.... His father is a fine old
gentleman, who has a lot of bushy gray hair, and eyebrows sticking
up all rough and knowing, with a comfortable way of coming up to
you with his hands in his pockets, and making _you_ comfortable,
and saying, in answer to your remark, that 'John's' prose works are
pretty good. His mother is a ruddy, dignified, richly dressed old
gentlewoman of seventy-five, who knows Chamonix better than
Camberwell; evidently a _good_ old lady, with the 'Christian
Treasury'tossing about on the table. She puts 'John' down, and
holds her own opinions, and flatly contradicts him; and he receives
all her opinions with a soft reverence and gentleness that is
pleasant to witness....

"I wish I could reproduce a good impression of 'John' for you, to
give you the notion of his 'perfect gentleness and lowlihood.' He
certainly bursts out with a remark, and in a contradictious way,
but only because he believes it, with no air of dogmatism or
conceit. He is different at home from that which he is in a lecture
before a mixed audience, and there is a spiritual sweetness in the
half-timid expression of his eyes; and in bowing to you, as in
taking wine, with (if I heard aright) 'I drink to thee,' he had a
look that has followed me, a look bordering on tearful.

"He spent some time in this way. Unhanging a Turner from the wall
of a distant room, he brought it to the table and put it in my
hands; then we talked; then he went up into his study to fetch down
some illustrative print or drawing; in one case, a literal view
which he had travelled fifty miles to make, in order to compare
with the picture. And so he kept on gliding all over the house,
hanging and unhanging, and stopping a few minutes to talk."

And yet there were many with whom he had to deal who did not look at
things in his light; who took his criticism as personal attack, and
resented it with bitterness. There is a story told (but not by himself)
about one of the "Notes on the Academy," which he was then
publishing--how he wrote to an artist therein mentioned that he
regretted he could not speak mor