all Jimman,
who was an expert with the pencil, and who colored with excellent
discrimination. He went to Dusseldorf at first, and became known to
Leutze, who praised his sketches. He began to associate at once with
students and tipplers, and dissipated less by drinking than by talking.
I have a theory that more men are lost to themselves and the age by a
love of "gabbing" than by drinking. It is not hard to eschew cognac and
claret, but there is no cure for "buzzing." There is a drunkenness of
talk which takes possession of one, and Jimman would have had the
_delirium tremens_ in a week, with nobody to listen to him. To my mind
the Trappiste takes the severest of monastic vows.

Jimman used to rise in the morning betimes, full of inflexible
resolution. Having stretched his canvas, and carefully prepared his
pigments, he went to breakfast, pondering great achievements. Here he
fell in with a lot of Germans,--the most incurable race of gossipers in
the world,--and while they discussed, in a learned way, every subject
under the sun, the meal extended into the afternoon, and Jimman
concluded that it was then too late to undertake anything. In this way
his ambition burnt away, his money was squandered, he lost facility of
manipulation, and came back to Paris at the age of twenty-eight, to
pursue the same listless, garrulous existence; debts and grisettes,
buzzing and brandy, the utterance of resolves which expired in the
utterance, and Jimman finally became, perforce, a common apprentice to a
moulder, that he might not entirely starve.

I saw him, for the last time, in the Louvre, looking at Zurbaran's
"Kneeling Monk."

"Ah, Townsend," he said, "I might have done something like that. All my
zeal is gone."

And he began to chat in the same loose, familiar way. Dumbness and
deafness would have been endowments rather than deprivations for him.

I had rooms in Florence with Gypsum and Stagg. The former was a young,
industrious fellow, of German descent, who worked hard, but not wisely.
He spent half a year in copying a face by Paul Veronese, and the other
half in sketching an old convent yard. But he did not visit, and an
artist, to get orders and take rank, must be seen as well as be earnest.
He need not be hail-fellow, but should keep well in the circle of
respectable travellers; for these are to be his patrons, if he pleases
them. Gypsum was over-modest and too conscientious; he had only a trifle
of money, and was carel