all the desire of a large class of charitable persons to be "doing good," in some sense of that very wide phase, they might possibly find some outlet for their energies in good offices towards the persons who are drifted into a temporary relation to them, in the shifting sense of modern society, We are all very anxious to take part in grand schemes of charity which make a great deal of noise and do a great deal of mischief. Some expenditure of ingenuity in discovering how we might do good to people who live in the same house with us, in spite of all the jealousies and susceptibilities that have been lately aroused or inherited from former times, would not be altogether thrown away. It is, doubtless, very picturesque to go out into the highways and hedges and give money to paupers who will still touch their hats and make curtsies for money; but it would also be of some practical advantage to discover means of knowing something of a human relation to the people who are so much to us and yet so strangely separated from our sympathies. But, perhaps, such a suggestion verges upon the Utopian.

80

The Swallows.

АH! swallows, is it so ?

Did loving lingering summer, whose slow pace
Tarried among late blossoms, loth to go,
Gather the darkening cloud-wraps round her face
And weep herself away in last week's rain?
Can no new sunlight waken her again?
"Yes," one pale rose ablow

Has answered from the trellised lane;
The flickering swallows answer "No."

From out the dim grey sky

The arrowy swarm breaks forth and specks the air,
While, one by one, birds wheel and float and fly,
And now are gone, then suddenly are there;

Till lo the heavens are empty of them all.
Oh fly, fly south, from leaves that fade and fall,
From shivering flowers that die;

Free swallows, fly from winter's thrall,
Ye who can give the gloom goodbye.

But what for us who stay

To hear the winds and watch the boughs grow black,
And in the soddened mornings, day by day,
Count what lost sweets bestrew the nightly track
Of frost-foot winter trampling towards his throne?
Swallows, who have the sunlight for your own,
Fly on your sunward way;

For you has January buds new-blown,
For us the snows and gloom and grey.

On, on, beyond our reach,

Swallows, with but your longing for a guide:

Let the hills rise, let the waves tear the beach,
Ye will not balk your course nor turn aside,
But find the palms and twitter in the sun.
And well for them whose eager wings have won
The longed-for goal of light;

But what of them in twilights dun

Who long but have no wings for flight?

AUGUSTA Webster.

Sir Edwin Landseer.

WHEN he was a very little boy, Edwin Landseer used to ask his mother to set him a copy to draw from, and then-so his sisters have told me―complain that she always drew one of two things, either a shoe or a currant pudding, of both of which he was quite tired. No wonder that this was insufficient food for the eager young spirit for whose genius in after life two kingdoms were not too wide a range. The boy, when he was a little older, and when his bent seemed more clearly determined, went to his father and asked him for teaching. The father was a wise man and told his son that he could not himself teach him to be a painter, that Nature was the only school, Observation the true and only teacher. He told little Edwin to use his own powers; to think about all the things he saw; to copy everything: and then he turned the boy out with his brothers-they were all three much of an age-to draw the world as it then existed upon Hampstead Heath. There seem to have been then, as now, little donkeys upon the common, old horses grazing the turf and gorse, and chickens and children at play, though I fear that now, alas! no little curly-headed boy is there storing up treasures for the use of a whole generation to come.

Day after day the children used to spend upon the Heath in the fresh air, at their sports and their flights, but learning meanwhile their early lesson. Their elder sister used to go with them, a young mentor to keep these frolicsome spirits within bounds. One can imagine the little party, buoyant, active, in the full delightful spring of early youth. Perhaps youth is a special attribute belonging to artistic natures, to those whom the gods have favoured, and the old fanciful mythology is not all a fable. . . . Some boys are never young. When I last saw Sir Edwin Landseer, something of this indescribable youthful brightness still seemed to be with him, although the cloud which dimmed his later years had already partially fallen. But the cruel cloud is more than half a century distant at the time of which I am writing, and, thanks be to Heaven, the whole flood of life, and work, and achievement lies between.

...

Little Edwin painted a picture in these very early days, which was afterwards sold. It was called the "Mischief-makers: a mischievous boy

had tied a log of wood to the tail of a mischievous donkey. The little donkey's head in the South Kensington Museum may have been drawn upon Hampstead Heath-a careful black-lead donkey, that cropped the turf and looked up one day, some sixty years ago, with a puzzled face. VOL. XXIX.-No. 169.

5.

Perhaps it was wondering at the size of the artist standing opposite, with his little sympathetic hand at work. The drawing is marked "E. Landseer, five years old." This little donkey, of the line of Balaam's ass, had already found out the secret and knew how to speak in his own language to the youthful prophet. Our little prophet needs no warning on his journey; he is not about to barter his sacred gift, and from Hampstead Heath, and from many a wider moor, he will honestly give his blessing to the tribes as they come up. The tribe of the poor; the tribe of the hardworking rich; the tribe of Manchester; the tribe of Belgravia. Which is there among them that has not been the better for it? There are other sketches in the frame at the Kensington Museum; a policeman pointed them out to me. "He knew Sir Edwin's pictures well, and his sketches, too; why, he was only six year old when he draw that dog," said the policeman, kindly. The dog is a pointer curling its tail; there is the household cat, too, with broad face and feline eyes. There is a more elaborate sketch done at the age of fifteen, and probably representing the same pointer grown into an ancient model now, and promoted from black-lead to water-colour. The young painter himself must have been near starting in life by this time: born with his fairy gift, the time was come to reveal it.

Little Edwin was eight years old when he first engraved a plate of etchings; asses' heads, sheep, donkeys were all there, and then came a second plate for lions and tigers. He was always drawing animals. When he was thirteen he exhibited the portrait of a pointer and puppy, and also the portrait of Mr. Simpson's mule, "by Master E. Landseer," as mentioned in the catalogue. In this year his father took him to Haydon the painter, for there is a notice in Haydon's "Diary" :—

"In 1815 Mr. Landseer, the engraver, had brought me his sons, and said: When do you intend to let your beard grow and take pupils ?' I said, 'If my instructions are useful or valuable, now.' 'Will you let my boys come?' I said, 'Certainly.' Charles and Thomas, it was immediately arranged, should come every Monday morning, when I was to give them work for the week. Edwin took my dissections of the lion, and I advised him to dissect animals as the only mode of acquiring a knowledge of their construction.

"This very incident generated in me the desire to form a school, and as the Landseers made rapid progress, I resolved to communicate my system to others."

In 1817 Landseer exhibited a picture of "Brutus," the family friend. After "Brutus" comes a picture called "Fighting Dogs getting Wind," which was his first real success. It was, I believe, bought by that friendly umpire of art, Sir George Beaumont. In 1818 Wilkie writes approvingly to Haydon, saying: "Geddes has a good head, Etty a clever piece, and young Landseer's jackasses are also good." Most of these facts I have read in a helpful little biography in the South Kensington Museum, which contains a list of Sir Edwin's early works. The list is a marvel

of length and industry. There are many etchings mentioned, and among them "Recollections of Sir Walter and Lady Scott." When Sir Edwin gave up etching, it was Thomas Landseer who engraved his pictures. And here I cannot help adding that, looking over the etchings of that early time, and of later date, my admiration has not been alone for Sir Edwin, but for his brother's work as well.

Haydon's advice about depicting lions seems to have stood the young student in good stead. There is mention made of roaring and prowling lions, of a lion disturbed at his meal, on a canvas six feet by eight. Haydon, as we know, was for extremes of canvas and other things. I heard a philosopher describe him only yesterday as "a strange medley of genius and vanity, of high intention and money operations—a man who did good work in his time, and who died for jealousy of Tom Thumb." Leslie, in his autobiography, has his appreciative word for Haydon: "I was captivated with Haydon's art," he writes, "which was then certainly at its best, and tried, but with no success, to imitate the richness of his colour and impasto . . . At a much later period I was struck with his resemblance to Charles Lamb's Ralph Bigod, Esq.,' that noble type of the great race of men- the men who borrow.' I even thought, before Lamb declared Fenwick to be the prototype of Bigod, that Haydon was the man, and I am not sure that Lamb did not think of him as well as of Fenwick. All the traits were Haydon's. Bigod had an undeniable way with him. He had a cheerful, open exterior, a quick, jovial eye, a bald forehead, just touched with grey, cana fides. He anticipated no excuse, and found none. When I think of this man-his fiery glow of heart, his swell of feeling— how magnificent, how ideal he was, how great at the midnight hour, and when I compare him with the companions with whom I have associated since, I grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into the society of lenders and little men."

There is a sketch in Mr. Symonds's book about Greek poets which also recalls Haydon, and gives us a classical image of him in brazen sandals and purple draperies.

In 1822 Landseer received a premium from the British Institution for a picture called "The Larder Invaded." In 1824 he paints the celebrated "Catspaw: the monkey's device for eating hot chestnuts." It was sold for 100l., and would fetch near 3,000l. now. Then he is made A.R.A.; and in 1826 the scene changes from lions' dens and monkeys' pranks to the well-loved moors and lakes-to the misty, fresh, silent life of the mountain that he has brought into all our homes.

Some of his earliest paintings are illustrations out of Walter Scott's romances. He loved Scott from the beginning to the very end of his life, and kept some of his books and some of Shakespeare's plays by his bedside, to read when he could not sleep. One of his very first oil pictures, however, was not out of a book: it was the portrait of his sister as a little baby girl, toddling about in a big bonnet.

There is a pretty little paragraph in Leslie's autobiography, about