st to take a view of his talent. Mr. Boughton is
a painter about whom there is little that is new to tell to-day, so
conspicuous and incontestable is his achievement, the fruit of a career
of which the beginning was not yesterday. He is a draughtsman and an
illustrator only on occasion and by accident. These accidents have
mostly occurred, however, in the pages of Harper, and the happiest of
them will still be fresh in the memory of its readers. In the _Sketching
Rambles in Holland_ Mr. Abbey was a participant (as witness, among many
things, the admirable drawing of the old Frisian woman bent over her
Bible in church, with the heads of the burghers just visible above the
rough archaic pew-tops--a drawing opposite to page 112 in the handsome
volume into which these contributions were eventually gathered
together); but most of the sketches were Mr. Boughton's, and the
charming, amusing text is altogether his, save in the sense that
it commemorates his companion's impressions as well as his own--the
delightful, irresponsible, visual, sensual, pictorial, capricious
impressions of a painter in a strange land, the person surely whom
at particular moments one would give most to be. If there be anything
happier than the impressions of a painter, it is the impressions of two,
and the combination is set forth with uncommon spirit and humor in this
frank record of the innocent lust of the eyes. Mr. Boughton scruples
little, in general, to write as well as to draw, when the fancy takes
him; to write in the manner of painters, with the bold, irreverent,
unconventional, successful brush. If I were not afraid of the
patronizing tone I would say that there is little doubt that if as a
painter he had not had to try to write in character, he would certainly
have made a characteristic writer. He has the most enviable "finds," not
dreamed of in timid literature, yet making capital descriptive prose.
Other specimens of them may be encountered in two or three Christmas
tales, signed with the name whose usual place is the corner of a
valuable canvas.

If Mr. Boughton is in this manner not a simple talent, further
complications and reversions may be observed in him, as, for instance,
that having reverted from America, where he spent his early years, back
to England, the land of his origin, he has now in a sense oscillated
again from the latter to the former country. He came to London one day
years ago (from Paris, where he had been eating nutr