I hope your business is settled by this time. I have seen praise of your
picture in the Athenaeum, which quoted also the Chronicle's good opinion.
I am very glad of all this and I hope you will now set to work, and paint
away with ease and confidence, forgetting that there is such a hue as
bottle-green {166} in the universe (it was tastefully omitted from the
rainbow, you see); and, in spite of what Moore says, paint English people
in English atmospheres. Your Coningham was rather orange, wasn't he? But
he was very good, I thought. Dress your ladies in cheerful dresses, not
quite so vulgar as Chalon's. . . . I heard from my sister that you had
finished Wilkinson to the perfect content of all: I had charged her
particularly not to allow Mrs. W. to intercede for any smirk or
alteration whatever.
My Venetian pictures look very grand on my walls, which previously had
been papered with a still green (not bottled) on purpose to receive them.
On my table is a long necked bottle with three flowers just now in it . . .
a tuft of rhododendron, a tuft of scarlet geranium, and a tuft of white
gilli-flower. Do you see these in your mind's eye? I wish you could
come down here and refresh your sodden eyes with pure daylight, budding
oak trees, and all the changes of sky and cloud. To live to make sonnets
about these things, and doat upon them, is worse Cockneyism than
rejoicing in the sound of Bow Bells for ever so long: but here one has
them whether one will or no: and they are better than Lady Morgan and ---
at a rout in Harley Street. Maclise is a handsome and fine fellow, I
think: and Landseer is very good natured. I long for my old Alfred
portrait here sometimes: but you had better keep it for the present. W.
Browne and Spedding are with me, good representatives one of the Vita
Contemplativa, the other of the Vita Attiva. Spedding, if you tell him
this, will not allow that he has not the elements of Action in him: nor
has he not: nor has not the other those of contemplation: but each
inclines a different way notwithstanding. I wish you and Spedding could
come down here: though there is little to see, and to eat. When you
write you must put _Woodbridge_ after Boulge. This letter of yours went
to Bury St. Edmunds, for want of that. I hear Alfred Tennyson is in very
good looks: mind and paint him _quickly_ when he comes to town; looking
full at you.
_To Bernard Barton_.
19 CHARLOTTE ST.,
RATHBONE PLACE.
[1844.]