A bold, original, impudent lot are these New Englanders, but they are notwithstanding wonderfully refreshing. Sometimes their spirits are too much for their strength, and they come tremendous "croppers." It has been well said that a strikingly original writer occasionally writes absolute nonsense, and by the same rule an artist, who turns aside from the well-swept, carefully watered, mathematically paved academic high road, must not infrequently paint absolute nonsense; but he thinks for himself, he does not view Nature through the spectacles of others, and in nine cases out of ten he is likely to produce works that will be successful in the long run. Though there are some pictures among the collection will make the casual visitor jump, there are not a few will make him think. Some of the rebels of 1889 have developed into the academics of thirty years later, and _Punch's_ list of the most notable contributors makes us jump as well as think: John S. Sargent, Solomon J. Solomon, Whistler, B. Sickert, Tuke, Edward Stott, A. Roche, N. Garstin, G. Roussell, Sidney Starr, F. Brown, A. Mann, H. Vos, W. J. Laidlaw and J. E. Christie. _Punch_, then, cannot be written down as a Philistine, but there is no denying the fact that his artistic judgment was warped and impaired by his invincible hostility to the æsthetic movement; his inability to disentangle the good in it from the evil; his confusion of charlatanry and sincerity; and his failure to recognize the great services rendered by Morris in the domain of decorative design. Prejudice and ignorance mingle with good sense and good feeling in the manifesto which _Punch_ put forth in 1882, and which may serve as a general exposition of his artistic and literary creed in the 'eighties:-- IN EARNEST Let us be clearly understood. The word "Æstheticism" has been perverted from its original meaning; i.e. the perception of all that is good, pure and beautiful in Nature and in Art, and, as now vulgarly applied, it has come in a slang sort of way to stand for an effeminate, invertebrate, sensuous, sentimentally-Christian, but thoroughly Pagan taste in literature and art, which delights in the idea of the resuscitation of the Great God Pan, in Swinburnian songs at their highest fever-pitch, in the mystic ravings of a Blake, the affectation of a Rossetti, the _Charmides_ and revoltingly pantheistic _Rosa Mystica_ of Oscar Wilde, the Songs of Passion and Pain and other similar mock-hysterical imitations of the "Mighty Masters." Victor Hugo, Ouida, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, have much to answer for.