And talking of artists, I may mention here that the only person of distinction whose acquaintance I ever made through my host was Frost, the accomplished follower of Etty as a painter of the nude. I had the mild, man-in-the-street sort of admiration of Frost’s work, which I had seen on the walls of the Royal Academy Exhibition, then held, not at Burlington House, but in Trafalgar Square. And from his pictures I expected—such are the perverse preconceptions of youth—to meet a young, tall, flamboyant man with flowing locks and the airs of a Grand Seignior. We were walking one morning—my host and I—down the main avenue of the Regent’s Park. It was spring-time. The flower-beds were ablaze with bulb plants. But few people were about at the moment. Presently we came upon a small and sombre man feeding the sparrows, which followed him in flocks, hovering about his head, and now and then lighting on his hand to snatch a crumb. The small, sombre man was dressed in rusty broadcloth. He wore a wig, had a most melancholy expression, and might have been put down as a superannuated tax-collector, a solicitor run to seed, a Dissenting preacher out of work; but not one man in a thousand would have identified him as a painter of nude subjects, which had been severely reprobated by the unco’ guid. Yet the amiable provider of food for the sparrows was none other than the celebrated Mr. Frost. Frost was a bachelor, and his house was kept for him by a couple of old maiden sisters, who had little sympathy with the direction in art which their brother’s genius had taken. But the sparrows in Regent’s Park altogether approved of their eccentric benefactor. And in this particular form of charity he was the forerunner of the amiable M. Pol (that is the Frenchman’s name, I think) whom I have watched feeding the birds in the gardens of the Tuileries. On this occasion Frost was not to be tempted into any discussion on art. He was intent on arguing the question of drains with my friend, and spoke on the sewer question with the dry particularity of a sanitary engineer. Altogether a disappointing experience of the painter of “Actea: the Nymph of the Shore,” a work which had stimulated all my youthful enthusiasm.