"Old Brown Bread"
himself, or of what he said to me, which, considering his notorious
dislike to children, is perhaps quite as well.

Of a very different type was another constant and always welcome
visitor to our house, Sir Edwin Landseer, the painter. He was one of my
father and mother's oldest friends, and had been an equally close
friend of my grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford. He had
painted three portraits of my father, and five of my mother. Two of the
latter had been engraved, and, under the titles of "Cottage Industry"
and "The Mask," had a very large sale in mid-Victorian days. His large
picture of my two eldest sisters, which hung over our dining-room
chimney-piece, had also been engraved, and was a great favourite, under
the title of "The Abercorn Children." Landseer was a most delightful
person, and the best company that can be imagined. My father and mother
were quite devoted to him, and both of them always addressed him as
"Lanny." My mother going to call on him at his St. John's Wood house,
found "Lanny" in the garden, working from a ladder on a gigantic mass
of clay. Turning the corner, she was somewhat alarmed at finding a
full-grown lion stretched out on the lawn. Landseer had been
commissioned by the Government to model the four lions for the base of
Nelson's pillar in Trafalgar Square. He had made some studies in the
Zoological Gardens, but as he always preferred working from the live
model, he arranged that an elderly and peculiarly docile lion should be
brought to his house from the Zoo in a furniture van attended by two
keepers. Should any one wish to know what that particular lion looked
like, they have only to glance at the base of the Nelson pillar. On
paying an afternoon call, it is so unusual to find a live lion included
amongst the guests, that my mother's perturbation at finding herself in
such close proximity to a huge loose carnivore is, perhaps, pardonable.
Landseer is, of course, no longer in fashion as a painter. I quite own
that at times his colour is unpleasing, owing to the bluish tint
overlaying it; but surely no one will question his draughtsmanship? And
has there ever been a finer animal-painter? Perhaps he was really a
black-and-white man. My family possess some three hundred drawings of
his: some in pen and ink, some in wash, some in pencil. I personally
prefer his very delicate pencil work, over which he sometimes threw a
light wash of colour. No one, seeing some