Francis James’s fondness for flowers is, in some sense, akin to a woman’s instinctive fondness for everybody’s children. He has joy in their mere life. And it is their life that he paints. And he paints them in their own atmosphere--the sunlight heightening so the key of their colour, or a little rain perhaps has fallen and their life is refreshed. Had the rain fallen when Van Huysum painted them, the drop would have glistened on the petal; the perfection of the imitation of it is what we might have been asked, first of all, to see and admire. But it is not their accidental condition that Francis James imitates. It is their splendid vigour or exquisite freshness--see, for instance, this noble primula with its deep glowing, slightly mauveish reds and its enriched green leaves; in its condition, a very bridegroom coming out of his chamber. Amongst flowers, Francis James, I find, is universal in his loves. He does not swear fidelity to the rose--or he does not swear the particular fidelity which is only exclusiveness. In every garden, every greenhouse, every season of the year, he has (to use the sailor simile) ‘a wife in every port.’ He is as various in his appreciations of the beloved and the admirable as is a young man by Mr. Thomas Hardy. Primula, tulip, rose, pelargonium, and then the hundred orchids--having thanked one of them for its beauty, and profited by it, he turns with happy expectation to another. Nor does disappointment await him. One little confidence--made to me long ago, I recollect--I propose, before I finish this article, ruthlessly to break. James destroys many drawings. He strangles the ill-begotten. He pronounces, with severity, judgment upon his creations. He assists the fittest to survive. Three or four years back he was wrestling manfully with the treatment of the orchid. No one, I think, had really treated the orchid before then. Since then, in oils, Mr. William Gale, in a group of works too little known, has treated it with unequal, of course, yet often with remarkable, skill. But when Francis James had drawn, at Sanders’ nursery--during several months’ sojourn at St. Albans, to that end--orchids of every kind, great was the massacre of the innocents. We were permitted afterwards to see the successes; the failures had been done away with.