When at home again a friend asked how she enjoyed her visit to Rome, and had she seen the Forum? In blank despair she appealed to me to help her out of it. "Yes," I replied, "you saw the Forum; that is where you picked the violets." The Forum to her was deadly dull and forgotten even by name, but a bunch of wild violets lived vividly in her memory as the crown and flower of her heart’s desire, more excellent than all the ruins of Rome. Dulness comes to us in uncongenial company and occupation. You may be surrounded by objects of interest and beauty which amuse other people, but if these worthy objects do not fit your taste, for you they contain no element of delight, and you are bored utterly with them whoever may sing their praise. It is a question of temperament. The heart is not dull if the head is _triste_. Every eye makes its own beauty and every heart forms its own kinships. Put me in front of a post-impressionist picture and dulness covers me like a funeral pall. The beauties of the glowing picture composed of significant form and bunkum are lost on me completely. Here is something tremendously original that makes demands on my intelligence that I cannot meet. I am mentally bankrupt in front of this maddening art. Looking at a post-impressionist picture, you see only shapes and forms tangled together within the limited area of a gilt frame; you see relations and quantities of colour splashed on canvas meaning anything you choose to label it, but in the likeness of nothing God made or man ever saw. It distorts nature and scoffs at portraiture. "Creating a work of art," trumpets the evangelist of post-impressionism, "is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching a likeness." "You look at a landscape, and you are not to see it as fields and cottages; instead you are to see it as lines and colours." Yet up against this lucid statement I observe no reason why the portrait of a man should be drawn like a peculiarly shaped market-garden divided into plots for growing vegetables. Nor can I explain why the picture of a village street should look like a fortnight’s wash suspended in a cherry orchard, and the policeman standing in front of the village inn at the corner should look like a laundry-maid hanging out the clothes. It requires uncommon genius to work the illusion successfully, and to start an indolent British public frivolling with the captivating puzzle. But it leaves me cold and passionless, for I am slow of understanding these things. They say an impressionist picture of top-note character is a painfully exciting object for the spectator to worship. To do it justice, he must squirm in front of it, for it is a picture that creates a thunderstorm of rhapsody, a deluge of delight, a roaring cataract of æsthetic emotion in the soul of the man who understands its cryptic language. The artist who limned the picture suffers agonies whilst