Page:Pen And Pencil Sketches - Volume I.djvu/154

100 much happier, leaving the luminous — perhaps too ideally luminous — child to adorn the pathetic paddock. I am too shy to speak to either of those beautiful ladies among the lilies (37, 67), and take refuge among the shy children before the ‘Chaplain’s Daughter’ (20) — delightfullest, it seems to me, of the minor designs, and a piece of most true and wise satire. The sketches of the ‘Daughter of Heth’ go far to tempt me to read the novel, and, ashamed of this weakness, I retreat resolutely to the side of the exemplary young girl knitting in the ‘Old Farm Garden’ (33), and would pick up the ball of worsted for her, but that I wouldn’t for the world disappoint the cat. No drawing in the room is more delicately completed than this unpretending subject, and the flower painting in it, for instantaneous grace of creative touch, cannot be rivalled ; it is worth all the Dutch flower-pieces in the world.

“Much instructed, and more humiliated, by pas- sage after passage of its rapidly-grouped colour, I get finally away into the comfortable corner beside the salmon-fisher and the mushrooms ; and the last-named drawing — despise me who may — keeps me till I’ve no more time to stay, for it entirely beats my dear old William Hunt in the simplicity of its execution, and rivals him in the subtlest truth.