to see the work of a gentleman who holds at Cambridge the same
professorship as Mr. Ruskin does at Oxford. Four of these are studies of
men's heads, done in two hours each for his pupils at the Slade Schools.
There is a good deal of vigorous, rough execution about them, and they
are marvels of rapid work. His portrait of Mr. Carlyle is
unsatisfactory; and even in No. 79, a picture of two scarlet-robed
bishops, surrounded by Spanish monks, his colour is very thin and meagre.
A good bit of painting is of some metal pots in a picture called Le
Chaudronnier.

Mr. Leslie, unfortunately, is represented only by one small work, called
Palm-blossom. It is a picture of a perfectly lovely child that reminds
one of Sir Joshua's cherubs in the National Gallery, with a mouth like
two petals of a rose; the under-lip, as Rossetti says quaintly somewhere,
'sucked in, as if it strove to kiss itself.'

Then we come to the most abused pictures in the whole Exhibition--the
'colour symphonies' of the 'Great Dark Master,' Mr. Whistler, who
deserves the name of '[Greek] as much as Heraclitus ever did. Their
titles do not convey much information. No. 4 is called Nocturne in Black
and Gold, No. 6A Nocturne in Blue and Silver, and so on. The first of
these represents a rocket of golden rain, with green and red fires
bursting in a perfectly black sky, two large black smudges on the picture
standing, I believe, for a tower which is in 'Cremorne Gardens' and for a
crowd of lookers-on. The other is rather prettier; a rocket is breaking
in a pale blue sky over a large dark blue bridge and a blue and silver
river. These pictures are certainly worth looking at for about as long
as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter
of a minute.