British art either finds her peculiar¹ nourishment² in melancholy³, and loves to fix her abode⁴ in desert places; or it may be her purse is but slenderly furnished, and she is forced to put up with accommodations rejected by more prosperous callings. Some of the most dismal⁵ quarters of the town are colonised by her disciples⁶ and professors. In walking through streets which may have been gay and polite when ladies’ chairmen jostled each other on the pavement, and linkboys with their torches lighted the beaux over the mud, who has not remarked the artist’s invasion of those regions once devoted⁷ to fashion and gaiety? Centre windows of drawing-rooms are enlarged so as to reach up into bedrooms — bedrooms where Lady Betty has had her hair powdered, and where the painter’s north-light now takes possession of the place which her toilet-table occupied a hundred years ago. There are degrees in decadence⁸: after the Fashion chooses to emigrate, and retreats from Soho or Bloomsbury, let us say, to Cavendish Square, physicians come and occupy the vacant houses, which still have a respectable look, the windows being cleaned, and the knockers and plates kept bright, and the doctor’s carriage rolling round the square, almost as fine as the countess’s, which has whisked away her ladyship to other regions. A boarding-house mayhap succeeds the physician, who has followed after his sick folks into the new country; and then Dick Tinto comes with his dingy⁹ brass¹⁰ plate, and breaks in his north window, and sets up his sitters’ throne. I love his honest moustache, and

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