diness, it
is as handiness regenerate and transfigured. The American adaptiveness
has become a Dutch finish. The only criticism I have to make is of the
preordained paucity of Mr. Millet's drawings; for my mission is not to
speak of his work in oils, every year more important (as was indicated
by the brilliant interior with figures that greeted the spectator in so
friendly a fashion on the threshold of the Royal Academy exhibition
of 1888), nor to say that it is illustration too--illustration of
any old-fashioned song or story that hums in the brain or haunts the
memory--nor even to hint that the admirable rendering of the charming
old objects with which it deals (among which I include the human face
and figure in dresses unfolded from the lavender of the past), the old
surfaces and tones, the stuffs and textures, the old mahogany and silver
and brass--the old sentiment too, and the old picture-making vision--are
in the direct tradition of Terburg and De Hoogh and Metzu.

III

There is no paucity about Mr. Abbey as a virtuoso in black and white,
and if one thing more than another sets the seal upon the quality of
his work, it is the rare abundance in which it is produced. It is not a
frequent thing to find combinations infinite as well as exquisite. Mr.
Abbey has so many ideas, and the gates of composition have been
opened so wide to him, that we cultivate his company with a mixture of
confidence and excitement. The readers of Harper have had for years a
great deal of it, and they will easily recognize the feeling I allude
to--the expectation of familiarity in variety. The beautiful art and
taste, the admirable execution, strike the hour with the same note; but
the figure, the scene, is ever a fresh conception. Never was ripe skill
less mechanical, and never was the faculty of perpetual evocation less
addicted to prudent economies. Mr. Abbey never saves for the next
picture, yet the next picture will be as expensive as the last. His
whole career has been open to the readers of Harper, so that what they
may enjoy on any particular occasion is not only the talent, but a kind
of affectionate sense of the history of the talent, That history is,
from the beginning, in these pages, and it is one of the most
interesting and instructive, just as the talent is one of the richest
and the most sympathetic in the art-annals of our generation. I may as
well frankly declare that I have such a taste for Mr. Abbey's work that
I