enter. Sir Frederick hinted the truth, and I do not think it will
displease him that I should say boldly what he was minded but did not
dare to say. The high position he occupies did not allow him to go
further than he did; the society of which he is president is now
irreparably committed to Anglo-French art, and has, by every recent
election, bound itself to uphold and impose this false and foreign art
upon the nation.

Out of the vast array of portraits and subject-pictures painted in
various styles and illustrating every degree of ignorance, stupidity,
and false education, one thing really comes home to the careful
observer, and that is, the steady obliteration of all English feeling
and mode of thought. The younger men practise an art purged of all
nationality. England lingers in the elder painters, and though the
representation is often inadequate, the English pictures are
pleasanter than the mechanical art which has spread from Paris all
over Europe, blotting out in its progress all artistic expression of
racial instincts and mental characteristics. Nothing, for instance,
can be more primitive, more infantile in execution, than Mr. Leslie's
"Rose Queen". But it seems to me superficial criticism to pull it to
pieces, for after all it suggests a pleasant scene, a stairway full of
girls in white muslin; and who does not like pretty girls dressed in
white muslin? And Mr. Leslie spares us the boredom of odious and
sterile French pedantry.

Mr. Waterhouse's picture of "Circe Poisoning the Sea" is an excellent
example of professional French painting. The drawing is planned out
geometrically, the modelling is built up mechanically. The brush,
filled with thick paint, works like a trowel. In the hands of the
Dutch and Flemish artists the brush was in direct communication with