Upright, and very accurately upright, as also the edges of the piece of cloth in its frame,--as also the gliding form of the angel,--as also, in severe foreshortening, that of the Virgin herself. It has been studied, so far as it has been studied at all, from a very thin model; and the disturbed coverlid is thrown into confused angular folds, which admit no suggestion whatever of ordinary girlish grace. So that, to any spectator little inclined towards the praise of barren "uprightnesse," and accustomed on the contrary to expect radiance in archangels, and grace in Madonnas, the first effect of the design must be extremely displeasing, and the first is perhaps, with most art-amateurs of modern days, likely to be the last. 229. The background of the second picture (Millais' "Blind Girl"), is an open English common, skirted by the tidy houses of a well-to-do village in the cockney rural districts. I have no doubt the scene is a real one within some twenty miles from London, and painted mostly on the spot. The houses are entirely uninteresting, but decent, trim, as human dwellings should be, and on the whole inoffensive--not "cottages," mind you, in any sense, but respectable brick-walled and slated constructions, old-fashioned in the sense of "old" at, suppose, Bromley or Sevenoaks, and with a pretty little church belonging to them, its window traceries freshly whitewashed by order of the careful warden. The common is a fairly spacious bit of ragged pasture, with a couple of donkeys feeding on it, and a cow or two, and at the side of the public road passing over it, the blind girl has sat down to rest awhile. She is a simple beggar, not a poetical or vicious one;--being peripatetic with musical instrument, she will, I suppose, come under the general term of tramp; a girl of eighteen or twenty, extremely plain-featured, but healthy, and just now resting, as any one of us would rest, not because she is much tired, but because the sun has but this moment come out after a shower, and the smell of the grass is pleasant.