capacity. I had no real love of art and did not understand it. I went to concerts, but the only part of a sonata or symphony which took hold of me was that which was melodious. The long passages with no striking theme in them conveyed nothing to me, and as to Bach, excepting now and then, his music was like a skilful recitation of nonsense verses. The _Marseillaise_ on a barrel-organ was intelligible, but gymnastics on strings—what did they represent? With pictures the case was somewhat different. I often left Clapton early in order that I might have half an hour at Christie’s in quiet, and I have spent many pleasant moments in those rooms on sunny mornings in May and June before De Wint’s and Turner’s landscapes. But I knew nothing about them. Without previous instruction I should probably have placed something worthless on the same level with them, and I could not fix my attention on them long. A water-colour by Turner, on which all his power had been expended, an abstract of years and years of toil and observation, was unable to detain me for more than five minutes, and in those five minutes I very likely did not detect one of its really distinguishing qualities. As to the early religious pictures of the Italian school, I cared nothing either for subject or treatment, and would have given a cartload of them for a drawing by Hunt of a bird’s nest. Wanting an ear for music and an eye for pictorial merit, I believed, or affected to believe, that the raptures of people who possessed the ear and eye were a sham. It irritated me to hear my aunt play, although she had been well taught in her youth and was a skilful performer. I know she would have liked to feel that she gave me some pleasure, and that her playing was admired, but I was so openly indifferent to it that at last she always shut the piano if I happened to come into the room while she was practising. I remember saying to her when she was talking to me about one of Mozart’s quartets she had just heard, that music was immoral, inasmuch as it provoked such enormous insincerity. It is strange that, although spite was painful to me, especially towards her, I could not help indulging in it.