Ratcliffe, who
introduced the romantic novel, and has consequently much to answer for;
the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, of whom Gibbon said that she was
'made for something better than a Duchess'; the two wonderful sisters,
Lady Dufferin and Mrs. Norton; Mrs. Tighe, whose Psyche Keats read with
pleasure; Constantia Grierson, a marvellous blue-stocking in her time;
Mrs. Hemans; pretty, charming 'Perdita,' who flirted alternately with
poetry and the Prince Regent, played divinely in the Winter's Tale, was
brutally attacked by Gifford, and has left us a pathetic little poem on
the Snowdrop; and Emily Bronte, whose poems are instinct with tragic
power, and seem often on the verge of being great.

Old fashions in literature are not so pleasant as old fashions in dress.
I like the costume of the age of powder better than the poetry of the age
of Pope. But if one adopts the historical standpoint--and this is,
indeed, the only standpoint from which we can ever form a fair estimate
of work that is not absolutely of the highest order--we cannot fail to
see that many of the English poetesses who preceded Mrs. Browning were
women of no ordinary talent, and that if the majority of them looked upon
poetry simply as a department of belles lettres, so in most cases did
their contemporaries. Since Mrs. Browning's day our woods have become
full of singing birds, and if I venture to ask them to apply themselves
more to prose and less to song, it is not that I like poetical prose, but
that I love the prose of poets.

LONDON MODELS

(English Illustrated Magazine, January 1889.)

Professional models are a purely modern invention. To the Greeks, for
instance, they were quite unknown. Mr. Mahaffy, it is true, tells us
that Pericles used to present peacocks to the great ladies of Athenian
society in order to induce them to sit to his friend Phidias, and we know
that Polygnotus introduced into his picture of the Trojan women the face
of Elpinice, the celebrated sister of the great Conservative leader of
the day, but these grandes dames clearly do not come under our category.
As for the old masters, they undoubtedly made constant studies from their
pupils and apprentices, and even their religious pictures are full of the
portraits of their friends and relations, but they do not seem to have
had the inestimable advantage of the existence of a class of people whose
sole profession is to pose. In fact the model, in our sense of