to you to tell me and help me to find it out. Darling, if ever woman was loved, you are, my Katherine; for now, with this black sheet before me, which makes even your dear face as dark as night, I would not give you up, even to see the blessed light of Heaven and the green earth again. I would rather be blind with you than see without you, Katherine.”
She did not answer, but she lifted up her face to his and kissed it; and Harry brought his white, thin face and rested it on Michael’s shoulder, and said:
“Michael, I wish I could make my eyes over to you. There’s the fishing at Oldcourt, splendid fishing, and you’ll never be able to fish without them. I would, if I could, Michael, for all my happiest days you’ve given me. And as to Katie, I hope you’ll like her much better than Simpson; and if she isn’t happy, it’s her own fault, that’s certain. Fancy not being happy at Oldcourt! And I dare say you’ll give her a bigger pony; she can’t have a better than Frisky, but she’s too tall for him, and you’ll always let him run in the park, won’t you, Michael, when he gets old? Never sell him for a donkey cart. It would break his heart, I know it would, Michael. He’d pull it; he’d pull anything; but I’m certain it would break his heart.”
And Michael Lee promised Frisky should always be cared for as if he were the best hunter in the land; and the little white face looked up lovingly into the poor blind eyes, and then went on to say:
“I think it was so very rum of Katie ever thinking she would not like it! Don’t you, Michael?”
And they both laughed and kissed him, and then the boy said he must go and tell his mother, for it was all his doing, every bit. And that evening, after tea, they all sat by Harry’s couch, all the time the big iron ship was break, break, breaking, on those cold grey stones, just across the island.
LAVINIA FENTON.
In his own day it was a constant accusation against William Hogarth, that he could not paint in “the historical manner”—that he could not rise out of “Low Art.” The cognoscenti of the period delighted in a complicated jargon, which seemed to mean, so far as it had any meaning, that painting was a sort of dead language—of no use but to a refined and gifted few—an exotic which could never flourish in a cold climate—that it had nothing to do with Nature or reality, and that, when it ventured to be intelligible to ordinary comprehensions, it became necessarily degraded and base.
If Hogarth had listened to all this elegant idiocy! But he presumed to think for himself: he turned his back, sturdily, resolutely, upon foreign art; he refused to multiply specimens of fifth-rate Italian schools; to produce compositions out of which ceaseless repetition had fairly beaten all the religion that had been planned originally to be their chief characteristic; to squander his life amid the clouds of an inane mythology or a ridiculous allegory. He set up his easel in the middle of the town to sketch the common life around him. He was nothing if not real and true. He comes down to us now a most trustworthy witness, whose evidence, touching the history of his own time, cannot be gainsaid. Once or twice—provoked by the carpings of his critics—worrying him while he painted, as small dogs might, snapping at his calves as he sat before his easel—he rose in his rage, determined to demonstrate that, an’ he chose, he could paint in the manner they would have him, and paint, too, as well as the best of the masters they were for ever lauding. Of course, in his haste, his anger, and his vanity, he made a great mistake. It is not within our purpose here to dwell upon the matter. Still, if he represented Danae as “a mere nymph of Drury,”—and Mr. Horace Walpole accused him of so doing, with great show of reason, it must be allowed,—if he treated Sigismunda as “a maudlin vigaro,” there can be no fear that he would be liable to a converse error. He would leave it to others to convert the Kitty Fishers of the hour into Cleopatras; to invest the Nelly O’Briens with the loveliness of innocence, or to make a goddess of grace out of such materials as a Nancy Parsons could furnish. He was safe enough while he was upon the ground; it was an error in such a man to attempt to mount into the skies: that was all. He was like an aëronaut who carries too much earth in his car—who may cut the tie-ropes one after another; but, for all that, his balloon will not soar into the empyrean.
Be sure, then, that we may place confidence in his portraits,—that we may accept these as unmistakably actual and life-like, needing no allowance to be made on the score of flattery; with no dimples to be deducted, no unlovely lines to be added; with no natural blemishes wilfully forgotten by the painter. And it is to the subject of one of his portraits we desire to bring the reader—a thoroughly English-looking girl, beautiful quite as much from her healthiness and freshness, and natural gifts of colour, as from the regularity of her features or the symmetry of her form. With frank, open grey eyes, delicately arched brows, well-shaped mouth, with luscious cherry-red lips and soft round chin; brown hair, gathered lightly—not brushed—back from her forehead, probably over a small pillow, surmounted by a dainty lace “mob” cap with many flaps, a string of pearls round her white neck; a dress of rich but sad-coloured silk, with broad ribbon and cord trimming à la militaire down the front; the dress high on the shoulders, low in the bosom, edged with a narrow frilling of lace, casting delicate reflections of light on the superbly-moulded bust. The dress very charming; but then it is, at all times, hard to say how much the prettiness of a costume may be attributable to the prettiness of the lady who wears it.
Such is the portrait, painted by Hogarth, of Lavinia Fenton, in the character of Polly Peachum, in the “Beggars’ Opera,”—an actress, who, during a very brief career upon the stage, seems to have ruled the London playgoers as absolutely—to have created as great a “sensation” (applying the word in a sense she never heard it invested with)—as in later times, within modern knowledge,—a Mademoiselle Jenny Lind or a Made-