ared to the racy flow of English table-talk, some forty
years back, than a group of artificial flowers is fit to compete with
a bouquet of richly scented dew-spangled buds, freshly plucked from the
garden.

Lord Brougham is our best man now, the readiest--a great quality--and,
strange as it may sound to those who know him not, the best-natured,
with anecdote enough to point a moral, but no storyteller; using his
wit as a skilful cook does lemon-juice--to flavour but not to sour the
_plat_.

Painters and anglers, I have remarked, are always silent, thoughtful
men. Of course I would not include under this judgment such as portrait
and miniature painters, who are about, as a class, the most tiresome and
loquacious twaddlers that our unhappy globe suffers under. Wilkie must
have been a real blessing to any man sentenced to sit for his picture:
he never asked questions, seldom indeed did he answer them; he had
nothing of that vulgar trick of calling up an expression in his sitter;
provided the man staid awake, he was able always to catch the traits of
feature, and, when he needed it, evoke the _prevailing_ character of
the individual's expression by a chance word or two. Lawrence was really
agreeable--so, at least, I have always heard, for he was before my day;
but I suspect it was that officious agreeability of the artist, the
smartness that lies in wait for a smile or the sparkle of the eye, that
he may transmit it to the panel.

The great miniature painter of our day is really a specimen of a
miniature intelligence--the most incessant little driveller of worse
than nothings: the small gossip that is swept down the back-stairs of a
palace, the flat commonplaces of great people, are his stock-in-trade:
the only value of such contributions to history is, that they must be
true. None but kings could be so tiresome! I remember once sitting to
this gentleman, when only just recovering from an illness, and when
possibly I endured his forced and forty-horse power of small talk with
less than ordinary patience. He had painted nearly every crowned head
in Europe--kings, kaisers, archdukes, and grand-duchesses in every
principality, from the boundless tracts of the Czar's possessions, to
those states which emulate the small green turf deposited in a bird's
cage. Dear me! how wearisome it was to hear him recount the ordinary
traits that marked the life of great people, as if the greatest Tory of
us all ever thought Kings and Queen