Lutetia, but Priam's son.) How
could he give the apple to any else but this enslaver--this joy of gods
and men? at whose benign presence the flowers spring up, and the smiling
ocean sparkles, and the soft skies beam with serene light! I wish we
might sacrifice. I would bring a spotless kid, snowy-coated, and a pair
of doves and a jar of honey--yea, honey from Morel's in Piccadilly,
thyme-flavoured, narbonian, and we would acknowledge the Sovereign
Loveliness, and adjure the Divine Aphrodite. Did you ever see my pretty
young cousin, Miss Newcome, Sir Brian's daughter? She has a great look
of the huntress Diana. It is sometimes too proud and too cold for me.
The blare of those horns is too shrill and the rapid pursuit through
bush and bramble too daring. O thou generous Venus! O thou beautiful
bountiful calm! At thy soft feet let me kneel--on cushions of Tyrian
purple. Don't show this to Warrington, please: I never thought when I
began that Pegasus was going to run away with me.

"I wish I had read Greek a little more at school: it's too late at my
age; I shall be nineteen soon, and have got my own business; but when
we return I think I shall try and read it with Cribs. What have I been
doing, spending six months over a picture of sepoys and dragoons cutting
each other's throats? Art ought not to be a fever. It ought to be a
calm; not a screaming bull-fight or a battle of gladiators, but a temple
for placid contemplation, rapt worship, stately rhythmic ceremony, and
music solemn and tender. I shall take down my Snyders and Rubens when
I get home; and turn quietist. To think I have spent weeks in depicting
bony life-guardsmen delivering cut one, or Saint George, and painting
black beggars off a crossing!

"What a grand thing it is to think of half a mile of pictures at the
Louvre! Not but that there are a score under the old pepper-boxes in
Trafalgar Square as fine as the best here. I don't care for any Raphael
here, as much as our own St. Catharine. There is nothing more grand.
Could the Pyramids of Egypt or the Colossus of Rhodes be greater than
our Sebastian? and for our Bacchus and Ariadne, you cannot beat the best
you know. But if we have fine jewels, here there are whole sets of them:
there are kings and all their splendid courts round about them. J. J.
and I must come and live here. Oh, such portraits of Titian! Oh, such
swells by Vandyke! I'm sure he must have been as fine a gentleman as
any he painted! It's a sh