The things we do!

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.


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