It is mainly in public parks that one finds the horticultural skill overbalanced, not by the architectural, but by the “Parks Committee” of the Town Council; consequently knowing, as every one must, the usual type of the Town Council Committee-man, one can only look for a display of ignorance, stupidity, and bad taste, the result of a combination of the three being sheer vulgarity. The Town Council usually have a highly competent horticulturist, and his part of the business is done well; but I have known many cases of the professional man being overruled by a vulgar, conceited member of the Committee even on a professional point, such as the arrangement of colour in a bed of single dahlias. “My missus abominates yaller,” was enough to veto a thoroughly artistic scheme for a portion of a public garden. I was in the studio of a distinguished portrait painter in London on what was called “Show Sunday”--the Sunday previous to the sending of the pictures to the Hanging Committee of the Royal Academy, and there I was introduced by the artist, who wanted to throw the fellow at somebody's head, not having anything handy that he could, without discourtesy, throw at the fellow's head, to a gentleman representing the Committee of Selection of a movement in one of the most important towns in the Midlands, to present the outgoing Lord Mayor with a portrait of himself. With so aggressively blatant a specimen of cast-iron conceit I had never previously been brought in contact. At least three of the portraits on the easels in the studio were superb. At the Academy Exhibition they attracted a great deal of attention and the most laudatory criticism. But the delegate from the Midlands shook his head at them and gave a derisive snuffle. “Not up to much,” he muttered to me. “I reckon I'll deal in another shop. I ain't the sort as is carried away by the sound of a name. I may not be one of your crickets; but I know what I like and I know what I don't like, and these likenesses is them. Who's that old cock with the heyglass--I somehow seem to feel that I've seen him before?” I told him that the person whom he indicated was Lord Goschen. “I guessed he was something in that line--wears the heyglass to make people fancy he's something swagger. Well, so long.” That was the last we saw of the delegate. He was not one of the horny-handed, I found out; but he had some connection with these art-arbiters; he was the owner of a restaurant that catered for artisans of the lower grade. I had the curiosity to inquire of a friend living in the town he represented so efficiently, respecting the commission for the portrait, and he gave me the name of a flashy meretricious painter whose work was treated with derision from Chelsea to St. John's Wood. But my informant added that the Committee of the Council were quite pleased with the portrait, and had drunk the health of the painter on the day of its presentation.