Well, we have only to pass a little while in his rooms, looking at his prints in their appropriate environment of beautiful old furniture, giving ourselves up to the pervading old-time atmosphere, and we shall begin to understand him and sympathise with his consistency. And, as the spell works, we shall find ourselves growing convinced that even a Venice set of Whistler etchings would seem decoratively incongruous amid those particular surroundings. For it is the spell, not of intrinsic artistic beauty, but of the eighteenth century that is upon us. It is the spell of a graceful period, compact of charm, elegance and sensibility, that these pretty old colour-prints, so typically English in subject and design, cast over us as we look at them. Thus they present themselves to us, not as so many mere engravings printed in varied hues, but rather as so many pictorial messages--whispered smilingly, some of them--from those years of ever-fascinating memory, when the newly-born Royal Academy was focussing the artistic taste and accomplishment of the English people, and Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, were translating the typical transient beauty in terms of enduring art, while the great engravers were extending the painters’ fame, and the furniture-makers and all the craftsmen were supporting them with a new and a classic grace; when Johnson was talking stately, inspiring common-sense, Goldsmith was “writing like an angel,” and Sheridan was “catching the manners living as they rose”; when Fanny Burney was keeping her vivid diaries, and Walpole and Mrs. Delany were--we thank Providence--writing letters; when the doings of the players at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, or the fashionable revellers at Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and the Pantheon, were as momentous to “the town” as the debates at Westminster, and a lovely duchess could immortalise a parliamentary election with a democratic kiss. These prints, hinting of Fielding and Richardson, Goldsmith and Sterne, tell us that sentiment, romantic, rustic and domestic, had become as fashionable as wit and elegance, and far more popular; while a spreading feeling for nature, awakened by the poetry of Thomson, Gray and Collins, and nurtured later by Cowper, Crabbe and Burns, was forming a popular taste quite out of sympathy with the cold academic formalism and trammelled feeling of the age of Pope. These literary influences are important to consider for any true appreciation of these old colour-prints, which, being a reflex in every respect of the popular spirit and character of the period in which they were produced, no other period could have bequeathed to us exactly as they are. And it is especially interesting to remember this, for, from the widespread popularity of these very prints, we may trace, in the pictures their great vogue called for, the origin of that abiding despot of popular English art which Whistler has, in his whimsical way, defined as the “British Subject.”