just enough to set our teeth on edge. There I remember a letter of Sir Walter Scott denying emphatically the authorship of Waverley. I afterwards had the pleasure to meet Mr. Jones, the curator of this magnificent place, and I begged him to hide that away, for it is not pleasant to see "Walter Scott's name appended to a lie. "Oh! he was a writer of fiction, you know," was his answer.
The National Gallery we visited on a private day, thanks to the courtesy of Sir John Bowring, whose accomplished wife and daughter we found copying pictures with great ability. This accomplishment, so rare here, is an almost universal one in England; all the educated women sketch well, and some paint admirably. The Hogarths interested me immensely. I had no idea he had such a charm of color. His pictures are as fresh to-day as when they were painted. I looked long and earnestly at the Turners, and found that I could get to understand them after a while. But Turner is like classical music and Browning's poetry — he requires study. The valuable Raphaels, Correggios, and other treasures of this glorious gallery have been too often described for me to add a word. The water-color galleries were our next great delight. We found these pictures exquisitely beautiful and choice. The English landscape lends itself naturally to water-color. When I afterwards paid a visit to an English country seat and saw, as I sat at breakfast, the old family chapel hung with ivy, just framed by the window, I said. "There you have a water-color arranged to your hand," I imagine this lack of neatly finished object is the reason we have so few water-colorists in the United States. Our grand distances and atmospheric effects, the absence of mullioned windows hung with
