se do not skip our little description. It is true that some of our
gifted contemporaries paint Italian scenery at prodigious length _a
propos de bottes_, and others show in many pages that the rocks and the
sea are picturesque objects, even when irrelevant. True that others gild
the evening clouds and the western horizon merely to please the horizon
and the clouds. But we hold with Pope that

"The proper study of mankind is man,"

and that authors' pictures are bores, except as narrow frames to big
incidents. The true model, we think, for a writer is found in the opening
lines of "Marmion," where the castle at even-tide, its yellow lustre, its
drooping banner, its mail-clad warders reflecting the western blaze, the
tramp of the sentinel, and his low-hummed song, are flung on paper with
the broad and telling touch of Rubens, not from an irrelevant admiration
of old castles and the setting sun, but because the human figures of the
story are riding up to that sun-gilt castle to make it a scene of great
words and deeds.

Even so, though on a much humbler scale, we describe Hope's cottage and
garden, merely because it was for a moment or two the scene of a
remarkable incident never yet presented in history or fiction.

This cottage, then, was in reality something between a villa and a
cottage; it resembled a villa in this, that the rooms were lofty, and the
windows were casements glazed with plate glass and very large. Walter
Clifford had built it for a curate, who proved a bird of passage, and
the said Walter had a horror of low rooms, for he said, "I always feel as
if the ceiling was going to flatten me to the floor." Owing to this the
bedroom windows, which looked westward on the garden, were a great height
from the ground, and the building had a Gothic character.

Still there was much to justify the term cottage. The door, which looked
southward on the road, was at the side of the building, and opened, not
into a hall, but into the one large sitting-room, which was thirty feet
long and twenty-five feet broad, and instead of a plaster ceiling there
were massive joists, which Hope had gilded and painted till they were a
sight to behold. Another cottage feature: the walls were literally
clothed with verdure and color; in front, huge creeping geraniums,
jasmine, and Virginia creepers hid the brick-work; and the western walls,
to use the words of a greater painter than ourselves, were

"Quite overcanopied with lush woodb