is retirement to the rank of "Honorary Academician,"
after a career such as few, if any, painters living can boast. This it
pleases the "Reviler" to congratulate artists upon as "good news,"
without a word or a thought of what the retiring Academician has done
in art, except to utter the contemptible untruth that "his resignation
means that he has found out that he is beaten," _not_ by the natural
failing of old age, but because he failed to impress such a writer as
this with the special exhibition of the works of his long life, that
was made some few years back to mark the completion of his last great
picture for the House of Lords, "The Judgment of Daniel." That
exhibition, which most people, who know anything about painting in its
highest style of religious and monumental art, thought a most
interesting display of a painter's career, is described by this most
genial of critics as "acres of pallid purple canvases, with wizened
saints and virgins in attitudinizing groups."

Whether that collection of Mr. Herbert's works had merit or not is
matter of opinion which I am not concerned to dispute; but, as a
matter of fact, there were only _three_ small pictures in which the
virgin or any saints appeared; the other pictures, besides the two
large works of "The Delivery of the Law" and "The Judgment of Daniel,"
painted for the nation, being historical subjects, such as the "Lear
Disinheriting Cordelia," a fresco of which is in the House of Lords;
"The Acquittal of the Seven Bishops," which the Corporation of Salford
purchased for their gallery of art; and several fine works of his
youth, such as the "Brides of Venice," a "Procession in Venice, 1528,"
and others, which won for him his election to the Academy forty-five
years ago, when he had to compete with such men as are, unfortunately,
not to be found now among the candidates--Etty--Maclise--Dyce--Egg--and
Elmore.

But the "_Saturday's_" art critic, if he ever saw this exhibition
at all, didn't go to see these pictures. As Goethe says, "the eye sees
what it came to see," and he went to see the "acres of purple
canvases, with their wizened saints," which were not there. No
matter--it suits his purpose to declare that they were, just as it
does to cram into a paragraph more ignorance, insolence, and false
assertions combined than is often to be met with even in this locality
of literature, where the editor seems to be surrounded with all the
prigs, and the pumps, and the s