ay to able-bodied
men:--which he is not, but the deception is not disingenuous. The
contrast flashed with the rapid exchange of two prizefighters in a ring,
very popularly. The fustian suit and string below the knee, on the
one side, and the purple plush breeches and twinkling airy calves
(fascinating his attention as he makes his humble request to his own,
these domestic knights) to right and left of the doorway and in front,
hit straight out of the canvas. And as quickly as you perceive the
contrast you swallow the moral. The dreaded thing is down in a trice, to
do what salutary work it may within you. That it passed into the blood
of England's middle-class population, and set many heads philosophically
shaking, and filled the sails of many a sermon, is known to those
who lived in days when Art and the classes patronising our Native Art
existed happily upon the terms of venerable School-Dame and studious
pupils, before the sickly era displacing Exhibitions full of meaning for
tricks of colour, monstrous atmospherical vagaries that teach nothing,
strange experiments on the complexion of the human face divine--the
feminine hyper-aethereally. Like the first John Mattock, it was formerly
of, and yet by dint of sturdy energy, above the people. They learnt from
it; they flocked to it thirsting and retired from it thoughtful, with
some belief of having drunk of nature in art, as you will see the
countless troops of urchins about the one cow of London, in the Great
City's Green Park.

A bequest to the nation of the best of these pictures of Old John, by
a very old Yorkshire collector, makes it milk for all time, a perpetual
contrast, and a rebuke. Compared with the portrait of Jane Mattock in
her fiery aureole of hair on the walls of the breakfast-room, it marks
that fatal period of degeneracy for us, which our critics of Literature
as well as Art are one voice in denouncing, when the complex overwhelms
the simple, and excess of signification is attempted, instead of letting
plain nature speak her uncorrupted tongue to the contemplative mind.
Degeneracy is the critical history of the Arts. Jane's hair was of a
reddish gold-inwoven cast that would, in her grandfather's epoch, have
shone unambiguously as carrots. The girl of his day thus adorned by
Nature, would have been shown wearing her ridiculous crown with some
decent sulkiness; and we should not have had her so unsparingly crowned;
the truth would have been told in a dext