erous concealment--a rope of
it wound up for a bed of the tortoise-shell comb behind, and a pair of
tight cornucopias at the temples. What does our modern artist do but
flare it to right and left, lift it wavily over her forehead, revel in
the oriental superabundance, and really seem to swear we shall admire
it, against our traditions of the vegetable, as a poetical splendour.
The head of the heiress is in a Jovian shower. Marigolds are in her
hand. The whole square of canvas is like a meadow on the borders of
June. It causes blinking.

Her brother also is presented: a fine portrait of him, with clipped
red locks, in blue array, smiling, wearing the rose of briny breezes, a
telescope under his left arm, his right forefinger on a map, a view
of Spitzbergen through a cabin-window: for John had notions about the
north-west passage, he had spent a winter in the ice, and if an amateur,
was not the less a true sailor.

With his brass-buttoned blue coat, and his high coloured cheeks, and his
convict hair--a layer of brickdust--and his air of princely wealth, and
the icebergs and hummocks about him, he looks for adventure without a
thought of his heroism--the country all over.

There he stands, a lover of the sea, and a scientific seaman and
engineer to boot, practical in every line of his face, defying mankind
to suspect that he cherishes a grain of romance. On the wall, just above
his shoulder, is a sketch of a Viking putting the lighted brand to his
ship in mid sea, and you are to understand that his time is come and
so should a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern
Viking, ready for the responsibilities of the title. Sketches of
our ancient wooden walls and our iron and plated defences line the
panellings. These degenerate artists do work hard for their money.

The portrait of John's father, dated a generation back, is just the man
and little else, phantomly the man. His brown coat struggles out of the
obscurity of the background, but it is chiefly background clothing him.
His features are distinguishable and delicate: you would suppose
him appearing to you under the beams of a common candle, or cottage
coalfire--ferruginously opaque. The object of the artist (apart from
the triumph of tone on the canvas) is to introduce him as an elegant and
faded gentleman, rather retiring into darkness than emerging. He is the
ghost of the painter's impasto. Yet this is Ezra Mattock, who multipled
the inheritance