Massachusetts, at the home of his mother-in-law. Mrs. Julia Ward
Howe. Robert Louis Stevenson had Elliott blood in his veins.
"Parts of me," he once wrote, "have shouted the slogan of the
Elliotts in the debatable land." If Stevenson's Homeric account
of the Four Black Elliotts in "Weir of Hermiston" is historically
veracious, we might fancy that one of their descendants would
feel his activities somewhat cramped on Beacon Street, Boston.
The Elliotts were a wild lot, and some of them did not escape the
hangman. Their family tree appears to have been the gallows. But
Stevenson tells us they were noted for their prayers, and at
least one of them wrote poetry, and declaimed it, drunk, to
Walter Scott, who retaliated in kind.

But the present John Elliott, artist, though he is of the kin of
Stevenson, and bears the dark hair and rather prominent,
melancholy eyes of the traditional Elliott stock, yet physically
much more closely resembles Edgar Allan Poe. If you press him
hard, he will confess that he began life by studying for the
stage, and "almost played Romeo," before painting drew him away.
Reaching Italy, he aspired to enter the studio of Don Jose di
Villegas, now director of the Prado Museum in Madrid, but then in
Rome. Villegas took no pupils. But "Jack" Elliott is Scotch. He
made a bargain. He would teach the master English, in return for
instruction in painting. At the end of two years, young Elliott
had learned much about art, but the master, he says, had acquired
only one English phrase--"I haf no money!"

At the end of two years, Elliott wished to leave, because he
despaired of painting like his master. "That is why I keep you,"
said Villegas; "you have retained your own manner and choice of