Preaching before Mary Queen of Scots and her maids of honour, old John Knox is reported to have said: "Oh, how beautiful, how charming, how pleasurable would be this life, _if it would only last!_" These were Mr. Vance Churchill's sentiments, but he soon found that it would not last. What the writers of those ghastly impositions, bacchanalian ditties, call "wine and women," or "beauty and the bowl," don't agree with hard work; and if you go to bed at five a.m. after orgies, you will not be able to paint your pictures next day, or to write your book, or mould your clay, or study your part. It is astonishing how slow people are to believe this, and how, year after year, we see friends and acquaintances still determined, not merely upon burning the candle at both ends, but lighting any bit of wick that may protrude in the middle, and quite astonished when they see the flame flicker and feel the whole affair about to collapse. Vance Churchill had plenty of commissions for pictures from first-rate people,--noblemen, connoisseurs, and patrons of art,--but he did not give himself the chances of painting them: his brain was never clear enough for conception, his hand never steady enough for execution; and the result was, that his financial affairs became desperate. His noble patrons never dreamed of parting with their money until the work was done--and in truth not often then; and there were in those days no middle-men, no bland picture-dealers, to advance large sums on untouched canvases; and even if there had been, they would have been far too wise to let Vance Churchill have any money on the strength of "working it out." So the money dwindled and dwindled, and then Vance began borrowing of his friends until he found averted faces and buttoned pockets, and then he faded straight away out of his grand society, and took lodgings at Chelsea, and tried once again to work for his livelihood. He painted one picture, which showed but few traces of his old force and promise. It was plain that the mischief was done; and then Vance Churchill, after steadily drinking for four days, was found one morning with an empty laudanum-phial in his clenched fingers, and a heartbreaking letter to his wife by his side.