Landseer after he became a student at the Royal Academy. "Edwin Landseer," he says, "who entered the Academy very early, was a pretty little curly-headed boy, and he attracted Fuseli's attention by his talents and gentle manners. Fuseli would look round for him and say, 'Where is my little dog-boy.""

The few words tell their story, and at the same time reveal the kind heart of the writer, who all his life seems to have admired and loved his younger companion, of whom there is frequent mention in his books.

"Art may be learnt, but can't be taught," says Leslie, as the elder Landseer had said. "Under Fuseli's wise neglect Wilkie, Mulready, Etty, Landseer, and Haydon distinguished themselves, and were the better for not being made all alike by teaching, if indeed that could have been done."

Fuseli's system seems to have been to come in with a book in his hand and to sit reading nearly the whole time he remained with the students; and here I cannot help saying that, notwithstanding his gentle vindication, Leslie himself followed a very different method. It is true that when he taught young painters he used to say very little, but "he would take the brushes and the pallet himself and show them a great deal," says his son George.

It is now about fifty years since the little dog-boy (who was only some nineteen years old) set up in life for himself, hired a tiny little cottage with a studio in St. John's Wood. The district even now is silent and unenclosed in many places. In those days it must have been almost a country place. A garden paling divided the painter and his young household from friendly neighbours; and Mrs. Mackenzie, his sister and housekeeper in those youthful days, has told us of pleasant early times and neighbourly meetings before the great eddying wave of life and popularity had reached the quiet place; while the young man works and toils at his art, and faces the early difficulties and anxieties that oppress him, and that even his fairy gift cannot altogether avert.

In one of the notices upon his pictures it is said that as a boy and a youth he haunted shows of wild beasts with his sketch-book, and the matches of rat-killing by terriers. Cannot one picture the scene, the cruel sport; the crowd looking on, stupid or vulgarly excited, and there, among coarse and heavy glances and dull scowling looks, shines the bright young face, not seeing the things that the dull eyes are watching, but discerning the something beyond—the world within the world-that life within common life that genius makes clear to us?

What are the old legends worth if this is not what they mean? Our Sir Orpheus plays, and men and animals are brought into his charmed circle. Qualities delicate, indescribable, sympathies between nature and human nature are revealed.

There is a description in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Transformation of Donatello and the animals. The young count calls in the forest, filling the air with a modulated breath; the poet describes the broad dialect -broad as the sympathies of nature-in which the human brother speaks to the inarticulate brotherhood that prowl the woods or soar upon the wing; intelligible to such extent as to win their confidence; and then comes the description of their answer :

"Donatello paused two or three times and seemed to listen; then, recommencing, he poured his spirit and life more earnestly into the strain; and, finally or else the sculptor's hope and imagination deceived himsoft treads were audible upon the fallen leaves. There was a rustling

among the shrubbery, a whirr of wings, moreover, that hovered in the air. It may have been all an illusion; but Kenyon fancied that he could distinguish the stealthy, cat-like movement of some small forest citizen; that he could even see a doubtful shadow if not really its substance. But all at once, whatever might be the reason, there ensued a hurried rush and scamper of little feet."

Some such art as Donatello's must have belonged to our Sir Edwin. There is a world to which some favoured spirits belong by natural right; others, more distant from its simple inspiration, want the interpreter who is to tell them the meaning of those sudden brown lights and wistful glances; those pricking ears and tails a-quiver; those black confiding noses, humorous and simple, snuffing and sniffing the heathery breezes. It is he who has summoned those little feet for us, coming, as in Donatello's charm, suddenly scampering down the mountain pass; we seem to hear the gentle flurry; or again, we are on the mountain itself; the figures lie motionless wrapped in their plaids, the stag is unconscious and quietly grazing, in branching dignity; it is the little doe, watchful, with sweet, up-pricked head, who is turning to give the alarm; or again it may be a tranquil mist through which the light forms are passing; or a stag wounded and trailing across the sunset waters to die.

Who does not know the picture called "Suspense": the noble hound watching at his master's closed door? The painter has painted a whole heart, tender reproach, silence, steady trust, anxious patience. The theme is utterly pathetic, and tells its story straight to the bystander; the door is closed fast and will never open; the frayed feather from the master's plume has fallen to the ground. He must have been carried by, for there is a drop of blood upon the feather and another on the floor beyond, and the helpless tender friend has been shut out. I can hardly imagine any picture more tranquil, more pathetic. Who that has ever been shut out, but will understand the pang?

And then, again, what home-like glimpses do we owe to Landseer-he has painted warmth, content, and fidelity. Look at that fireside party; the tender contentment of the colley, whose faithful nose is guarding the old shepherd's slippers; or the highland breakfast scene, with its gentle, almost maternal, humours; the baby, the proud mother, the little fat puppies that are a pleasure to behold. In the well-known painting of the "Shepherd's Last Mourner," the pathos consists as much in that which is not as in that which is there. The dog with silent care rests his head upon the lonely coffin. He does not understand very much about it all: life he can understand, not death. His feeling is more touching in its incompleteness than if he could grasp anything beyond the present strange wistful moment. Is there aspiration is such a picture? There is natural religion most certainly, as there must be in all true nature. No saint depicted in agony, no painted miracle, could give a more vivid realisation of simple natural feeling, of the mysterious love and fidelity which is in life, and which the very dog can understand, as he silently watches by his old master's coffin.

As I write a friend is saying that some people complain, and not without justice, that Landseer, in some instances, makes his animals almost too human. The picture of Uncle Tom and his wife in chains has been instanced. In the "Triumph of Comus "the blending of animal and human nature is almost painful to look at, and it is a relief to turn from its nightmare-like vividness to those peaceful cliffs hanging on the wall beyond, where the fresh daylight comes over the crisping waters, where the children are at play and the sheep grazing at the cannon mouth.

One can recognize in some of the earlier paintings of Sir Edwin the impression of the mental companionship of those who influenced the school of art at the beginning of this century. Regarding this, the school of Wilkie, of Mulready, I can only turn once more to Leslie's temperate criticisms. "Every great painter," he says, "carries us into a world of his own, where, if we give ourselves up to his guidance, we shall find much enjoyment, but if we cavil at every step, we may be sure there is a greater fault in ourselves than any we can discover in him."

We do not lower our individuality because we submit for a time and learn to see life from different points of view. I have often heard my father say that every beginner who has anything in him imitates somebody else at first, and a true and original worker does not lose but gains by merging himself for a time into the spirit of others.

The school which preceded Edwin Landseer was a placid and practical school, looking for harmonies rather than for contrasts, somewhat wanting in emotion and vividness of feeling. The meteor-like Turner blazed across the path of these quiet students without inspiring them with his own dazzling and breathless grasp of time and light. Leslie, writing of art, looks back wistfully to the times of Stothart, Fuseli, of Wilkie, Lawrence, Etty, and Constable; but, with all their harmony of colour and merits of natural expression, they do not strike the human chords that Sir Edwin has struck in his highest moments of inspiration. This much one cannot deny that his pictures are unequal, sometimes over-crowded, sometimes wanting in tone and colour; there are subjects too which seem scarce worthy of his consummate pencil. His very popularity is a hard test, and the constant reproduction of his pictures on every wall must needs blunt their fresh interest. But this is hypercriticism. How many blank front parlours, how many long dull passages and tiresome half hours of life has he changed and brightened. Remembering some of these half hours, one could almost wish that none but pleasant associations might belong to those familiar apparitions of playful paws, and trustful noses. A pretty little page returning from the chase was the playfellow of our own early life; the sun fell on his innocent head as he hung on the wall of our high-perched Paris home. Here, by a foggier fireside, the children grow up companionably with the dear big dog that is saving the little child from the sea. It was the beneficent painter himself who sent this big dog to live with us with a friendly cypher in a corner of the frame.