iiij. grs. rustic bridge. Nature
never plants--nature is no gardener--no design, no proportion in the
fields.

Colours! Passing a gasworks perhaps you may have noticed that the
surface of the water in the ditch by the roadside bears a greenish scum,
a pale prismatic scum; this is the colour-box of modern landscape.

How horrible the fields would look if they wore such hues in reality as
are accepted on canvas at the galleries! Imagine these canvas tints
transferred to the sward, the woods, the hills, the streams, the sky!
_Dies irae, dies illae_--it would, indeed, be an awful day, the Last Day
of Doom, and we should need the curtain at Drury Lane drawn before our
eyes to shut it out of sight.

There are some who can go near to paint dogs and horses, but a meadow of
mowing grass, not one of them can paint that.

Many can _draw_ nature--drawings are infinitely superior generally to
the painting that follows; scarce one now paints real nature.

Alere could not squeeze his sketches into the dress-coat of sham colour
for any sacred exhibition wall whatever.

One thing Alere never attempted to draw--a bird in flight. He recognized
that it was impossible; his taste rejected every conventional attitude
that has been used for the purpose; the descending pigeon, the Japanese
skewered birds, the swallow skimming as heavily as a pillow. You cannot
draw a bird in flight. Swallows are attempted oftenest, and done worst
of all.

How can you draw life itself? What is life? you cannot even define it.
The swallow's wing has the motion of life--its tremble--its wonderful
delicacy of vibration--the instant change--the slip of the air;--no man
will ever be able to draw a flying swallow.

At the feet of this Gamaliel of Fleet Street, Amaryllis had sat much,
from time to time, when the carpet-bag was packed and Alere withdrew to
his Baden-Baden--_i.e._, to Coombe Oaks and apple-bloom, singing finch,
and wild-flowers.

There were no "properties" in Alere's room at his lodgings; no odd bits
collected during his wanderings to come in useful some day as make-up,
realistic rock work, as it were, in the picture. No gauntlets or
breast-plates, scraps of old iron; no Turkish guns or yataghans, no
stags' horns, china, or carvings to be copied some day into an
illustration. No "properties."

No studio effects. The plaster bust that strikes the key and tones the
visitors' mind to "Art," the etchings, the wall or panel decorations,
the slidi