"I understand," rejoined the Fairy, "you are the goodlooking pauper who hung on to my Lord Swinestale, the pampered beggar whom his kinsmen loathe, and who toadies my lord in hopes of having a place in his testament."

was probably too poor to purchase the liqueurs of which he was fond, the gift was to be considered as an act of charity on the part of the mistress of the Chateau de Luz.

This capricious benefactress seemed by no means disposed to relax in her attendance at the studio in the church. Day after day she was to be found at her post; now, as the whim seized her, preserving an impenetrable silence: now establishing a conversation with the painter on the same terms of mingled sarcastic familiarity and frigid hauteur which had before distinguished their entretiens. One morning,-St. Luke's drapery was quite finished now, and the last touches were being put to his sainted sandals,-the Fairy said abruptly to Leonard:

"You smoke?"

66

Somewhat too frequently for my health, I am afraid," was the reply.

66

May I ask you, Madame la Comtesse Malinska, on my side, why you bade him threaten me with death by means of a double-barrelled fowling-piece? Why did you call me a dog? Why are you always vilifying me? Why do you keep your window open, and resent the vicinity of listeners? I won't ask how you dare do any of these things, because it appears to me that you are a lady who would dare do any thing."

"I asked you one question, and you are insolent enough to ask me half-a-dozen in return. It does not matter. The wretched negro will be seen no more at the infamous alehouse where he disgraced himself."

Surely you have not shot him with the double-barrelled fowling-piece, Madame la Comtesse ?"

"I am not at my own home, and have not the power of life and death, but I have bastinadoed the wretch soundly. He had a headaché yesterday, and now he has an ache in the soles of his feet. He had need walk on all-fours, the degraded barbarian."

"You are quite oriental in your notions, madam." The Fairy with the Fair Hands disdained to reply to this, and, without any word of farewell, gathered up her sombre drapery and swept out of the church.

"At least," said Leonard to himself, "it is something to hear her talk. Her speaking voice is quite as pretty as her singing one. I don't believe she is half so mad as she seems." That evening there arrived at the vicarage,-not, however, by the hands of Serge Ali Hammam, who had not been seen since the momentous night of the supper, and it is to be presumed was anointing his swollen feet somewhere, a delicate little basket containing divers flasks of Maraschino, curaçoa, parfait amour, and eau d'or de Dantzic. On the card nailed to the basket it was intimated, in the Countess Malinska's well-known handwriting, that these cates were for the Englishman who was staying with the Abbé Guillemot; and as the countess never conferred a favour without adding an insult thereto, it was quite natural to find appended a paragraph stating that as the English were well known to be a drunken nation, and the Englishman at the vicarage

"Hypocrisy! Are you not a Protestant?"

"I admit it; but that is no reason why I should be a heathen."

"I say again, Smoke!"

"I must respectfully decline. If you will allow me to take away the cigarette, I will promise to smoke it after lunch." For all reply the Fairy crumpled up the little paper cigar in her tiny white hands, and scattered the tobacco dust over the marble pavement. Then she produced another cigarette from her case, together with a golden fusee box, drew from it a piece of amadou, kindled it, deliberately lighted her 'weed," and, puffing the smoke in little blue spirals through goodness knows what interstice of her veil, swept towards the door.

66

"I shall return no more," she said, in a cold and bitter tone. And in a moment the Fairy with the Fair Hands was

gene.

She did not come again for a week. At first Leonard laughed at her absence, and thought "she will return tomorrow." But she did not return. Then he strove to persuade himself that she would come the next day. But another and another day elapsed, and there was no Fairy. Dayrell grew uneasy, he knew not why, and in spite of himself. Braving Serge Ali Hammam and the menace of the double-barrelled fowling-piece, he thought, on the fifth day of the Fairy's absence, that there would be no harm in strolling up to the Chateau de Luz. Its occupant might be ill, might have gone away, he debated within himself. Why should Leonard Dayrell have troubled himself about the proud and insulting lady of the chateau and her movements?

The window towards the road was closed. "The weather is growing cold," murmured Leonard. "Fond as she is of open windows, she will scarcely risk bronchitis." And he returned very slowly and sadly to the vicarage. He was quite out of spirits. The Abbé Guillemot rallied him on his melancholy. Madame Grugeon opined that it was the migraine, and prescribed a warm tisane of marjoram with a soupçon of rhum de Jamaïque therein. "After all," remarked these good people among themselves, "it is not so very surprising. M. Dayrell has nearly finished his fresco (and a charming fresco it is). My lord marquis doubtless requires his presence in Albion, the cold and brumous. He has a kind heart; and he is sorry to leave the village where he has been so happy, and on which he has conferred such happiness.'

Thus reasoned the sages of Cidre-Fontaines. Some portion of their surmises was correct. The fresco was nearly completed; and Lord Swinestale was growing exceedingly fidgetty for the return of his protegé, and had written him more than one kindly yet pressing letter, applauding the fresco enterprise; but telling him that he was wanted very badly in London, and recommending him, if he found the work lag on his hands, to allow "one of those French fellows" to

finish it. But the anticipation of his approaching departure from Cidre-Fontaines was not by any means the chief cause of Leonard Dayrell's sadness.

Just seven days were past since the Fairy had visited him, and he had never met her abroad since the adventure of the cigarette, and the notable fresco was really finished. Leonard was "scumbling" the foreground, reviewing his work,-with which, although the abbé and the inhabitants generally were in ecstasies at every touch thereof, he was but half satisfied, and, perhaps from fatigue, perhaps from some occult feeling, had given vent to a long-drawn sigh, when he felt a light touch on the shoulder.

He turned round and found the Fairy.

"You were right, and I was wrong," she said in a softer tone than he had ever yet known her assume. "I am sorry, forgive me!" And she held out one of her little white hands.

The painter seized it, and by an almost involuntary impulse, was about to carry it to his lips, but he timorously checked himself, and, contenting himself with a pressure in which he endeavoured to combine respect with tenderness, bowed low, and faltered:

"I thank you, madam. I feared not only that you were angry, but that you were ill."

dictates of a feeling which he was half ashamed of and half delighted in, Leonard, who was the soul of honour and candour, duly informed the Abbé Guillemot of his invite to the chateau. The good ecclesiastic received the news with s puzzled look; scratched his head, and, according to his custom, had recourse to the blue cotton pocket-handkerchief. "You have made a conquest, my son," he remarked, after a pause. "The countess's condescension is, to say the least, eccentric. Yet, frankly, I cannot see any harm in your accepting it. She is a femme posée. Her passport is perfectly en règle, and describes her as Madame la Comtesse Malinska, thus inferring that she must be either married or a widow. I would go with you, only it is most probable that the imperious lady of the chateau would at once order me to be shown to the door. I know you to be good and honourable. Go, therefore, and if anybody dares to whisper scandal about your visit, I, Guillaume Guillemot, curé of St. Luc des Fontaines, will denounce the slanders even from my own pulpit." With this sacerdotal acquiescence in his mission, Leonard went with a light heart to the chateau at the time appointed. He was received at the gate, with many grins, by Serge Ali Hammam, who did not seem any the worse for the pedal punishment he had been said to have endured. Perhaps he had recently recovered from the effects of his chastisement. At all events he skipped quite nimbly before the expected guest, and led him to a comfortably furnished little salon, whose

"You need not explain. I tell you again that I am not angry. You are a very good boy; and I am a wilful, perverse, and ungovernable woman. I will give you a reason why you have heard or seen nothing of me. I have been at work."

"And my work is just finished," the painter said, with another sigh, and looking towards St. Luke and the Virgin. "I am sorry, very sorry." The Fairy said this, and both remained silent. Then, if I am not mistaken, there was another sigh, and a very tender one. But I think it came through the folds of the Fairy's sable veil.

"You are going away?" she asked in a low tone. "In two or three days. I must hasten back to England, or I shall be in disgrace with my patron. I am poor, and must not venture to offend him.

"I will give you twenty thousand francs if you will stay, and cover the walls of the church with pictures," cried, with a short, sharp, passionate suddenness, the Fairy with the Fair Hands.

which apartment, seated before a little walnut-tree table, Leonard found the Fairy with the Fair Hands busily employed in writing. She was not quite alone, for, at a few paces from her, sate, on a low stool, the wrinkled old Muscovite attendant, sedulously plying needle and thread at a tambour frame.

pen. tea.

The countess, not one fold of whose veil was disturbed,"However can she see to write through that thick silk?" Leonard asked himself,- -rose as her visitor entered. "I have just finished my work," she said, laying down her "Come and sit by me. I am going to give you some Serge Ali Hammam, slave and toper, tea!" The negro made an abject oriental reverence, grinned, and disappeared. He soon returned bearing a huge Russian Samovar, a brazen urn for hot water, heated by live charcoal contained in a tube passing down the centre. Then Serge Ali Hammam brought a lacquer tray with two glass tumblers, a porcelain saucer full of slices of lemon, and a plate of crisp little biscuits. Leonard had to drink the very strongest green tea, made without sugar or milk, and flavoured only with one of the slices of lemon. The tea itself was exceedingly aromatic; but it was so potent an infusion, that it had very nearly as strong an effect on the painter's head as the

Any favour that it is in my humble power to grant." "Come to the Chateau de Luz this evening. You need not be afraid. You will do me no harm, and I shall do you none. You may tell the Abbé Guillemot, if you like; only, promise to come."

Fairy was good enough to inform him was the à la Russe. She offered him some caviar to eat with his biscuits; but as Leonard had once before tasted that saline condiment, and found it intolerably nasty, he declined with such earnestness, that the countess laughed, did not insist, and asked him if he would smoke instead. This he was only too glad to accept; whereupon the Fairy clapped her hands, and Serge Ali Hammam brought her a Sevres vase full of the finest Bassarabian tobacco, and a sheaf of papiros or cigarette tubes in paper; with her own fair hands the countess made the cigarettes; Leonard smoked, she smoked. The evening seemed to pass as in an enchanted castle. The Fairy sang to him, she played, she laughed. She talked in French and English and Italian on art, on literature, on music, on politics even.

At last midnight struck.

"It is time for you to go," the countess said. Go, and God bless you, Leonard: stay, take this with you." She held out to him a little packet, which she had just sealed. "Read it at your leisure," she continued. "It may

ducted to the gate by Serge Ali Hammam, more profuse in grins than ever. The painter crammed all the loose cash in his pocket, there were two or three gold pieces among the handful; but had there been a hundred napoleons he would not have stayed to count them,-into the negro's dingy palm, and rushed, rather than ran, home.

The Abbé Guillemot had long since retired to rest. Madame Grugeon admitted him with a smile of peculiar significance; wished him bonne nuit and bonne chasse, and retired to her own isolated domicile. No sooner had Leonard entered his sleeping chamber than he eagerly examined the packet, which the countess had given him. The outer envelope was blank; he tore it off, and found in the inner cover, in the handwriting of the Fairy, this superscription:

"FOR LEONARD DAYRELL.

(To be continued).

EMINENT LIVING ARTISTS.-MR. J. E.
MILLAIS, A.R.A.

MR. JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS is of Guernsey descent, and was born in Southampton in 1819. His strong instinct for art manifested itself very early; and I believe almost before he could spell short sentences he had learned to draw ships, and to sketch cleverly, spiritedly, and with more than ordinary correctness. At nine years old he was already a phenomenon, and, coming to London, entered Mr. Sass's academy in Charlotte-street. At eleven, a cherub boy, beautiful as a child Pericles, he throned himself on a little hard-edged stool in the Royal Academy antique school, and set hard to work measuring, stippling, and anatomizing. By the time he was eighteen, no Peninsula veteran could have hung more medals upon his breast than this stripling genius had done.

When only nine he won his first medal at the Society of Arts. Years later the gold and silver decorations were still being plucked by him from the tree of honour. Like Massena, while still a lad, he might have been called the Spoiled Child of Fortune. Still wrestling with the angel for his blessing, still watching nature, learning, thinking, and weighing, in 1846, Mr. Millais, who seemed to unite French elasticity with English depth, exhibited his first picture at the Academy, Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru,-whether his gold medal picture or not I do not know, but I believe it was a clever though conventional work, full of good colour and remarkable for exquisite drawing, equal to Maclise's. The artist had chosen a picturesque subject, but he did not attempt to pass a moral verdict on the shameful act of Spanish treachery. In his next picture, Dunstan's Emissaries seizing Queen Elgiva, one could not again help feeling that here was a young genius taking up the first subject he met with that would allow of vigorous treatment, and furnish scope for a redundant but as yet immature judgment.

In the year of the Westminster Hall Exhibition of fresco designs, this daring young Prometheus,-this creator,-broke out on an enormous scale with his Widow's Mite, a weak and inadequate subject. This design I do not remember.

In 1848, a register of facts tells us, appeared at the British Institution Millais' Tribe of Benjamin seizing the Daughters of Shiloh. This I think was a medal picture. I remember it well. It was a scriptural version of the Rape of the Sabines, utterly wrong in costume and details, but vigorously, daringly drawn, in the old manner: but originality or purpose it had none.

About 1849,-with Keats's Isabella I think,-the date of the real dawn in Mr. Millais' mind must be fixed. His friends Holman Hunt, Dante Rossetti, and Maddox Brown, were to be found in the next year, 1850, the P.R.B.,-the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood,-one of the most powerful sects English art has ever given birth to,-the sect that Royal Academicians think arose like Mormonism, but that some of the first minds of the day consider arose rather as the Protestantism of Luther, to confute old errors and revivify the blank corpse of true art. This Keats picture showed that Mr. Millais was reading Keats, and if Keats, Wordsworth and the Lake school; if he was reading the Lake school with enjoyment, he was also becoming more gothic and less classi

Germ; or, Art and Poetry," for several numbers expressed their aspirations, but the brotherhood was too small then to support a magazine; now, they no longer require one. Soon Mr. Paton, Mr. Charles Collins, Mr. Lockyer (since dead), Messrs. Wallis, Martineau, Marks, and a crowd of other young men joined the P.R.B. banner; a storm of abuse and ridicule broke out on them as they rose above the horizon; but in every school it was soon seen that the rising generation of thinkers and workers was with them. You could hardly get the lads to chain themselves to the classic; nothing but the necessity of doing drawings from the antique in order to qualify themselves for the Royal Academy schools kept them steady at all. They were all mutineers; the best of them wavered, to a man.

Though always true in principle, the movement at first had certainly a ridiculous side. It was "too picked, too spruce, too peregrinate, as it were," for the great public. The P.R.B. drew such ugly faces and lean splay forms, fiddled so with leaves of mustard and cress herbage, chose such fantastic or ascetic subjects, their colours were so vivid yet so crudely bright, they had no background, no air, and not much perspective; they did such extraordinary surprises, and were a little mountebank in their juggleries. In fact, they were young men, and they scarcely knew what they wanted; they were experimentalizing; they were also wilful and obstinate, and were angry at the unjust and cruel abuse heaped upon them. They had at all risks to attract attention and get talked about; and certainly, as struggling men of genius, as yet undeveloped, they were very cruelly treated. But still nothing could strangle them. They were far too much alive.

Foremost among these young men for breadth and versatility came Mr. Millais, for Mr. Hunt felt his way by more mystic and quieter works. He was the P.R.B champion,-their David,--because he was such a manifest colourist, and knew the artifices of both schools. He drew well and daringly; he coloured, too, as if he had spent a lifetime discovering pigments.

His earliest heretical works (Was Saul also among the Prophets? said the Academicians), were daringly original. No flower girls, or gipsies, or boys by the coast, or bar-maids, half-silly, half-wanton. No! In 1850 appeared, I think, his picture of Christ in the Carpenter's Shop, beautiful in detail, but mean in face, affected, quaint, and fantastic,-fantastic, too, with the dead affectation of the thirteenth century, as if we had anything in common with those days of pure faith and frank manliness. Ferdinand lured by Ariel, too, an imaginative but wild picture, appeared the same year. Not long after this came out Noah's Daughters, a thoughtful, wilfully eccentric picture, and in 1851, Mariano in the Moated Grange, and the Woodman's Daughter. These pictures were quite misunderstood and much abused. The papers, rejoicing in the vivid gown of Mariana, calls her a lazy housemaid yawning; while the woodman's daughter was nicknamed a horrible dowd." Hard, crude caricatures, with vulgar colour and hideous faces, cried some; original, fervid, hopeful, powerful, wonderful works, shouted others; and the others were right, so were the some. Yet still, said the majority, this artist is a colourist; he is utterly born blind as to beauty; he deforms all he touches; but the students could not be torn from their heresies, and furious was the controversial babble in studios.

this.

In 1856 Mr. Millais fell off sadly; he painted too much, and neglected the finish and drawing and truth which had gained him so many admirers. Peace Concluded was vulgar and hot in colour, the Child of the Regiment a mere pretty sketch of a sleeping child, and the Blind Girl, a very poor picture indeed.

Yet still the P. R. B.'s would have remained mere guerillas in art for some years more, had not in 1851, in the mick of time, Mr. Ruskin stepped forth as to an Homeric contest, and done battle for the new faith, in letters to that great mouthpiece of the world, the Times. He showed that Turner himself had in his art asserted P.R.B. principles. He showed that, with many defects, the new pictures contained many patent, but still more hidden, beauties. He gave, in fact, arguments to their friends and death-blows to their enemies. In his pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism, and in his lectures on architecture and painting, Mr. Ruskin followed up later the same views, with all his great and subtle sense and eloquence.

It was something, to show that Pre-Raphaelitism was not a new error, but only a new truth revived. People began to see that after all it was the idealists who were the heretics, and the laughter began to turn. As men became convinced, purchasers, too, flocked in, and soon the young artist was loaded with commissions at his own price.

In 1853 Mr. Millais showed great progress. His work had more breadth and thought, was more built up with colour, more massive, more full of common sense. In this year appeared his celebrated Order of Release, and his Proscribed Royalist,--both engraved. In the latter picture the painting was in part hard and metallic; and, again, I suppose, from a want of sense of the ludicrous, the hiding man's face was rather ludicrously woe-begone. The Order of Release is, however, a truly great work. It represents a wife bringing proudly to her Jacobite husband in prison an order of release. The old cocked-hatted gaoler-soldier at the door receives it with lingering indifference. The child is asleep in its mother's arms, and some primroses picked by the way side have fallen from its little hand on the prison floor. The Highlander, overcome with joy, has thrown his head on his wife's shoulder. This is one of the best pictures the English school has produced, so strong is it in thought and rigorous in execution. The figures (painted, I believe, on a white Vandyck ground), stood out like figures in a relief. The public were taken by storm. Night and day, from May to July, delighted jostling crowds stood before that picture.

Mr. Millais had now grown braver and maturer in style. Some admired his detail, others his colour, all the bold, manly truth of his drawing, his industry, and his vigour.

The Autumn Leaves was his best work of this year, in which he seemed to have renounced, in defiance, all the qualities by which he had won his fame. If he goes on like this, said his enemies, he will soon sink into one of those mere miserable picture manufacturers of whom we have already so many. Haste seemed now his great characteristic, quantity rather than quality his great aim and his poor ambition. His colour too grew hot and mottled, and his very faces mannered.

Yet still by many the Autumn Leaves was thought true and poetical; the twilight was so deep toned and luminous. The children were of such a grand type of children, and there was something about the whole so sombre, grave, and profound; but even about them there was too little of the old patience and fanatic fervour. It was said that Mr. Millais, angry at being praised perpetually for such a low quality as finish, determined somewhat arrogantly to show the world that he could, if he chose, excel in the broad style of his noisy adver saries. The dealers, always ready to sniff out low motives, said, on the other hand, that the young genius found it more profitable to paint fast and carelessly.

In 1857, still equally rough and ready, Mr. Millais threw fresh shells into the academic camp. His Sir Isumbras at the Ford was a most clever but most preposterous picture of a gigantic knight on a toy horse; never was horse worse painted; but still the old knight in the gilt mail had a thoughtful, wise tenderness about his face, and the children were shy and pretty. The Escape of a Heretic was equally unpleasant. The story told was confused and difficult to read, and, from the old want of a perception of the ludicrous, the anxious lover's face became ridiculous in its overstrained passion. It proved, what already scarcely needed proof, that Mr. Millais' genius was great, but that his taste was still intermittent and immature.

Mr. Millais' later pictures we must now dismiss. Varied, prolific, and original, Mr. Millais, during the last few years, has had many triumphs and many reverses, but he has never since risen as high as the Order of Release, never fallen as low as Sir Isumbras.

That was a great year of daring intellectual exertion that he exhibited the Nun's Burial Place and the Children Junketing. I forget what were the names the painter himself appended to these clever but singular productions. In some portions the colour was quite Titanesque, and the breadth of both was extreme; yet the want of finish was painful, and the execution, in places, slovenly beyond all precedent. The Nun's Burial Place was a twilight scene,-the children picture a spring noon, with an orchard in flower, and with fresh grass sprinkled with flowers like dots of gold. The different stages of girlhood and its varieties were skilfully shown, but some of the children were hard and cruel-looking, and there was a vicious grimness about others that was repugnant to even many admirers of Mr. Millais. I think of the two that I preferred the nun picture. It had a most impressive, lurid sadness about it, and there was a whole library against nunneries in the stern asceticism of the elder sister who watches the younger nuns digging a grave in the twilight. The skull-like face of this elder woman was dreadful to look upon, and the background was as lurid and as strong as the figures.