oyal personage. One day, said Wills
(telling the story quite innocently), the Princess was prevented from
coming as usual to his studio, and he received a message from Windsor
Castle, where the Princess and the Queen were staying, from the Queen's
secretary, commanding his presence there to give the Princess her
lesson, and to spend the night. This would be regarded by the ordinary
British subject not only as an order to be instantly and unhesitatingly
obeyed, but as a high honor and distinction. "But the fact is," said
Wills, with his easy smile, "I'd promised to be at my friend
Corkran's reception that evening, and, of course, I couldn't think of
disappointing him; there was no time to write, so I just sent a telegram
to the castle saying I was engaged." Probably English society history
does not contain a parallel to this piece of audacity, and one would
have liked to see the face of the private secretary of her Majesty
when he opened the telegram. But Wills could not be made to recognize
anything singular in the affair.

Commenting in one of his private note-books, at this time, upon the
subject of modern sculpture in general, my father utters one of his
unregenerate opinions. "It seems to me," he says, "time to leave off
sculpturing men and women naked; such statues mean nothing, and might as
well bear one name as another; they belong to the same category as the
ideal portraits in books of beauty or in the windows of print-shops.
The art does not naturally belong to this age, and the exercise of it,
I think, had better be confined to manufacture of marble fireplaces."
As we shall see, he modified this radical view before he left Italy; but
there is some ground of truth in it, nevertheless.

Here is another bit of art criticism. He has been giving a detailed
description of the sitting-room in one of our lodgings, and of the
objects contained in it, evidently as a part of his general practice to
record the minor facts of English life, to serve as a background for the
English romance he hoped to write afterwards. "On the mantle-piece," he
writes, "are two little glass vases, and over it a looking-glass (not
flattering to the beholder), and above hangs a colored view of some lake
or seashore, and on each side a cheap colored print of Prince Albert
and one of Queen Victoria. And, really, I have seen no picture, bust,
or statue of her Majesty which I feel to be so good a likeness as this
cheap print. You see the whole li