as in _The Blind Boy_, or Bohemia with _The Miller and his Men_, or
Italy with _The Old Oak Chest_, still it was Transpontus. A botanist
could tell it by the plants. The hollyhock was all pervasive, running
wild in deserts; the dock was common, and the bending reed; and
overshadowing these were poplar, palm, potato tree, and _Quercus
Skeltica_--brave growths. The caves were all embowelled in the
Surreyside formation; the soil was all betrodden by the light pump of
T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to be sure, had yet another, an oriental string:
he held the gorgeous east in fee; and in the new quarter of Hyeres,
say, in the garden of the Hotel des Iles d'Or, you may behold these
blessed visions realised. But on these I will not dwell; they were an
outwork; it was in the occidental scenery that Skelt was all himself.
It had a strong flavour of England; it was a sort of indigestion of
England and drop-scenes, and I am bound to say was charming. How the
roads wander, how the castle sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates
from behind the cloud, and how the congregated clouds themselves
uproll, as stiff as bolsters! Here is the cottage interior, the usual
first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of onions, the
gun and powder-horn and corner-cupboard; here is the inn (this drama
must be nautical, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold Bob Bowsprit) with
the red curtain, pipes, spittoons, and eight-day clock; and there
again is that impressive dungeon with the chains, which was so dull to
colour. England, the hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses, windmills,
glimpses of the navigable Thames--England, when at last I came to
visit it, was only Skelt made evident: to cross the border was, for
the Scotsman, to come home to Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there
the horse-trough, all foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the
ripe age of fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to
load it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own
ideal, radiating pure romance--still I was but a puppet in the hand of
Skelt; the original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the
antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank,
had adorned the hand of Jonathan Wild. "This is mastering me," as
Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life,
art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped
himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a
p