irst effect of the design must be extremely
displeasing, and the first is perhaps, with most art-amateurs of modern
days, likely to be the last.

229. The background of the second picture (Millais' "Blind Girl"), is an
open English common, skirted by the tidy houses of a well-to-do village
in the cockney rural districts. I have no doubt the scene is a real one
within some twenty miles from London, and painted mostly on the spot.
The houses are entirely uninteresting, but decent, trim, as human
dwellings should be, and on the whole inoffensive--not "cottages," mind
you, in any sense, but respectable brick-walled and slated
constructions, old-fashioned in the sense of "old" at, suppose, Bromley
or Sevenoaks, and with a pretty little church belonging to them, its
window traceries freshly whitewashed by order of the careful warden.

The common is a fairly spacious bit of ragged pasture, with a couple of
donkeys feeding on it, and a cow or two, and at the side of the public
road passing over it, the blind girl has sat down to rest awhile. She is
a simple beggar, not a poetical or vicious one;--being peripatetic with
musical instrument, she will, I suppose, come under the general term of
tramp; a girl of eighteen or twenty, extremely plain-featured, but
healthy, and just now resting, as any one of us would rest, not because
she is much tired, but because the sun has but this moment come out
after a shower, and the smell of the grass is pleasant.

The shower has been heavy, and is so still in the distance, where an
intensely bright double rainbow is relieved against the departing
thunder-cloud. The freshly wet grass is all radiant through and through
with the new sunshine; full noon at its purest, the very donkeys bathed
in the rain-dew, and prismatic with it under their rough breasts as they
graze; the weeds at the girl's side as bright as a Byzantine enamel, and
inlaid with blue veronica; her upturned face all aglow with the light
that seeks its way through her wet eyelashes (wet only with the rain).
Very quiet she is,--so quiet that a radiant butterfly has settled on her
shoulder, and basks there in the warm sun. Against her knee, on which
her poor instrument of musical beggary rests (harmonium), leans another
child, half her age--her guide;--indifferent, this one, either to sun or
rain, only a little tired of waiting. No more than a half profile of her
face is seen; and that is quite expressionless, and not the least
pre