my feelings, had to place in the parlour and keep there I blush to remember how long. It must be admitted that this was scarcely an achievement to encourage an interest in art. For the appreciation of art, as for its practice, it is important to have nothing to unlearn from the beginning; mine was the sort of training to reduce me to the necessity of unlearning everything; and most of my contemporaries, on leaving school, were in the same plight.
My eyes were no better trained than my hands. Works of art at the Convent consisted of the usual holy statues designed for our spiritual, not aesthetic edification; the Stations of the Cross whose merit was no less spiritual; two copies of Murillo and Rafael which my Father, in the fervour of conversion, presented to the Mother Superior; and a picture of St. Elizabeth of Hungary that adorned the Convent parlour, where we all felt it belonged, such a marvel to us was its combination of brilliantly-coloured needle-and-brush work.
Illustrated books there must have been in the ill-assorted hodge-podge of a collection in the Library from which we obtained our reading for Thursday afternoons and Sundays. But though I doubt if there was a book I had not sampled, even if I had not been able to read it straight through, I can recall no illustrations except the designs by Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, made for Moxon's Tennyson and reproduced by the Harpers for a cheap American edition of the Poems, a copy of which was given to me one year as a prize. Little
