 down with him to his father's
        rectory in August and see the country round there. But I think
        self-interest well understood will take me to Topping Abbey, for Sir
        Hugo has invited me, and proposes - God bless him for his rashness! -
        that I should make a picture of his three daughters sitting on a bank -
        as he says, in the Gainsborough style. He came to my studio the other
        day and recommended me to apply myself to portrait. Of course I know
        what that means. - »My good fellow, your attempts at the historic and
        poetic are simply pitiable. Your brush is just that of a successful
        portrait- painter - it has a little truth and a great facility in
        falsehood - your idealism will never do for gods and goddesses and
        heroic story, but it may fetch a high price as flattery. Fate, my
        friend, has made you the hinder wheel - rota posterior curras, et in axe
        secundo - run behind, because you can't help it.« - What great effort it
        evidently costs our friends to give us these candid opinions! I have
        even known a man take the trouble to call, in order to tell me that I
        had irretrievably exposed my want of judgment in treating my subject,
        and that if I had asked him he would have lent me his own judgment. Such
        was my ingratitude and my readiness at composition, that even while he
        was speaking I inwardly sketched a Last Judgment with that candid
        friend's physiognomy on the left. But all this is away from Sir Hugo,
        whose manner of implying that one's gifts are not of the highest order
        is so exceedingly good-natured and comfortable that I begin to feel it
        an advantage not to be among those poor fellows at the tip- top. And his
        kindness to me tastes all the better because it comes out of his love
        for you, old boy. His chat is uncommonly amusing. By the way, he told me
        that your Vandyke duchess is gone with her husband yachting to the
        Mediterranean. I bethink me that it is possible to land from a yacht, or
        to be taken on to a yacht from the land. Shall you by chance have an
        opportunity of continuing your theological discussion with the fair
        Supralapsarian - I think you said her tenets were of that complexion? Is
        Duke Alphonso also theological? - perhaps an Arian who objects to
        triplicity. (Stage direction. While D. is reading, a profound scorn
        gathers in his face till at the last word he flings down the letter,
        grasps his coat- collar in a statuesque attitude
