No subject is uninteresting if discoursed with an engaging pen, for words throw colour-magic on things that are common-place and give charm to them. I have watched Italian sunlight playing on the crumbling plaster walls of a peasant’s cottage on the Tuscan hills, drenching them in opal and rose-carmine splendours, changing them into the image of a fairy palace. Words cast sunlight on commonplace, familiar things, flushing them with a radiance all their own, and so awaking our mind to see new beauties, or old beauties made manifest in a new light which had been staled by the lethargy of custom. Miss Mitford’s village was an ordinary Berkshire village mute in the annals of English history, but it was surprised into fame by the romantic pen of its lady historian. A splendid accident of literary achievement adorned it with immortality, for it unfolds vividly before our wondering eyes the beauty of petty things and plain people in village life. The world owes to her genial pen a debt of gratitude; for it has won our sympathies, and in reading her book we can read our own village with interest instead of boredom, and see for ourselves the beauty and pathos and comedy of common people and homely things around us. Art is the gift of God to man. It is impossible to buy or barter for the possession of it. You may cultivate, improve, perfect the indwelling talent, but the Divine seed is sown mysteriously in the life of the child when brought to birth. In whom the secret power lies dormant none know until the appointed hour reveals its budding graces. Inscrutable is the Divine favour; none can tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. It is not inherited like gold or lands; it is not an entailed honour which accompanies the family title. Genius seldom, like an heirloom, passes from sire to son in direct succession. A man may possess the advantages that education, training, culture give, yet all these excellent acquirements combined cannot manufacture an artist. It needs the live coal taken from off the altar to kindle the sacred flame which illumines the artist’s soul. The painter’s art is subject to this very mysterious law. Philip Gilbert Hamerton describes the working of the artistic spirit in man. He says: "Painting is a pursuit in which thought, scholarship, information, go for little; whereas a strange, unaccountable talent working in obscure ways achieves the only results worth having. Here is a field in which neither birth nor condition is of any use, and wealth itself of exceeding little; here faculty alone avails, and a kind of faculty so subtle and peculiar, so difficult to estimate before years have been spent in developing it, or wasted in the vain attempt to develop where it does not exist."