heart, and in another second the familiar words strike fresh upon the
ear. Painters lay a canvas aside, and presently come to it, as they say,
with a new eye; but a purchaser once seized with this desperate malady
has no such refuge. After putting his treasure away for years, at the
first glance all his satiety returns. I myself have diagnosed a case
where a fine drawing by Gerôme grew to be a veritable incubus. It is
understood that the market for pictures is falling yearly. I believe
that the growth of this dislike to the eternal stillness of a painted
scene is a chief cause of the disaster. It operates among the best class
of patrons.

For such men orchids are a blessed relief. Fancy has not conceived such
loveliness, complete all round, as theirs--form, colour, grace,
distribution, detail, and broad effect. Somewhere, years ago--in Italy
perhaps, but I think at the Taylor Institution, Oxford--I saw the
drawings made by Rafaelle for Leo X. of furniture and decoration in his
new palace; be it observed in parenthesis, that one who has not beheld
the master's work in this utilitarian style of art has but a limited
understanding of his supremacy. Among them were idealizations of
flowers, beautiful and marvellous as fairyland, but compared with the
glory divine that dwells in a garland of _Odontoglossum Alexandræ_,
artificial, earthy. Illustrations of my meaning are needless to experts,
and to others words convey no idea. But on the table before me now
stands a wreath of _Oncidium crispum_ which I cannot pass by. What
colourist would dare to mingle these lustrous browns with pale gold,
what master of form could shape the bold yet dainty waves and crisps and
curls in its broad petals, what human imagination could bend the
graceful curve, arrange the clustering masses of its bloom? All beauty
that the mind can hold is there--the quintessence of all charm and
fancy. Were I acquainted with an atheist who, by possibility, had brain