e in engraving. My stepmother, however, brought a
flavour of the fine arts with her; a kind of aesthetic odour,
like that of lavender, clung to her as she moved. She had known
authentic artists in her youth; she had watched Old Crome
painting, and had taken a course of drawing-lessons from no less
a person than Cotman. She painted small watercolour landscapes
herself, with a delicate economy of means and a graceful Norwich
convention; her sketch-books were filled with abbeys gently
washed in, river-banks in sepia by which the elect might be dimly
reminded of _Liber Studiorum_, and woodland scenes over which the
ghost of Creswick had faintly breathed. It was not exciting art,
but it was, so far as it went, in its lady-like reserve, the real
thing. Our sea-anemones, our tropic birds, our bits of spongy
rock filled and sprayed with corallines, had been very
conscientious and skilful, but, essentially, so far as art was
concerned, the wrong thing.

Thus I began to acquire, without understanding the value of it,
some conception of the elegant phases of early English
watercolour painting, and there was one singular piece of a
marble well brimming with water, and a greyish-blue sky over it,
and dark-green poplars, shaped like wet brooms, menacing the
middle distance, which Cotman himself had painted; and this
seemed beautiful and curious to me in its dim, flat frame, when
it was hoisted to a place on our drawing-room wall.

But still I had never seen a subject-picture, although my
stepmother used to talk of the joys of the Royal Academy, and it
was therefore with a considerable sense of excitement that I
went, with my Father, to examine Mr. Holman Hunt's 'Finding of
Christ in the Temple' which at this time was announced to be on
public show at our neighbouring town. We paid our shillings and
ascended with others to an upper room, bare of every disturbing
object, in which a strong top-light raked the large and
uncompromising picture. We looked at it for some time in silence,
and then my Father pointed out to me various details, such as the
phylacteries and the mitres, and the robes which distinguished
the high priest.

Some of the other visitors, as I recollect, expressed
astonishment and dislike of what they called the 'Preraphaelite'
treatment, but we were not affected by that. Indeed, if anything,
the exact, minute and hard execution of Mr. Hunt was in sympathy
with the methods we ourselves were in the habit of using w