ixpences. Some
disparaging thoughts upon our own generation could hardly fail to
present themselves; but it is perhaps only the _sacer vates_ who is
wanting; and we also, painted by such a man as Carolus Duran, may look
in holiday immortality upon our children and grandchildren.

Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are by no means of the same order of
merit. No one, of course, could be insensible to the presence of Miss
Janet Suttie or Mrs. Campbell of Possil. When things are as pretty as
that, criticism is out of season. But, on the whole, it is only with
women of a certain age that he can be said to have succeeded, in at all
the same sense as we say he succeeded with men. The younger women do not
seem to be made of good flesh and blood. They are not painted in rich
and unctuous touches. They are dry and diaphanous. And although young
ladies in Great Britain are all that can be desired of them, I would
fain hope they are not quite so much of that as Raeburn would have us
believe. In all these pretty faces you miss character, you miss fire,
you miss that spice of the devil which is worth all the prettiness in
the world; and, what is worst of all, you miss sex. His young ladies are
not womanly to nearly the same degree as his men are masculine; they are
so in a negative sense; in short, they are the typical young ladies of
the male novelist.

To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with young and pretty sitters; or
he had stupefied himself with sentimentalities; or else (and here is
about the truth of it) Raeburn and the rest of us labour under an
obstinate blindness in one direction, and know very little more about
women after all these centuries than Adam when he first saw Eve. This is
all the more likely, because we are by no means so unintelligent in the
matter of old women. There are some capital old women, it seems to me,
in books written by men. And Raeburn has some, such as Mrs. Colin
Campbell, of Park, or the anonymous "Old lady with a large cap," which
are done in the same frank, perspicacious spirit as the very best of his
men. He could look into their eyes without trouble; and he was not
withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from recognising what he saw
there and unsparingly putting it down upon the canvas. But where people
cannot meet without some confusion and a good deal of involuntary
humbug, and are occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very
different vein of thought, there cannot be much