“Mr. Whistler is so young in spirit that his friends must have read with surprise the Dutch physician’s pronouncement that the present illness is due to ‘advanced age.’ In England sixty-seven is not exactly regarded as ‘advanced age;’ but even for the gay ‘butterfly’ time does not stand still, and some who are unacquainted with the details of Mr. Whistler’s career, though they may know his work well, will be surprised to hear that he was exhibiting at the Academy forty-three years ago. His contributions to the exhibition of 1859 were ‘Two Etchings from Nature,’ and at intervals during the following fourteen or fifteen years Mr. Whistler was represented at the Academy by a number of works, both paintings and etchings. In 1863 his contributions numbered seven in all, and in 1865 four. Among his Academy pictures of 1865 was the famous ‘Little White Girl,’[48] the painting that attracted so much attention at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. This picture--rejected at the Salon of 1863--was inspired, though the fact seems to have been forgotten of late, by the following lines of Swinburne: “‘Come snow, come wind or thunder High up in air, I watch my face and wonder At my bright hair, etc., etc.’” The item called forth the following characteristic correction, dated from The Hague: “SIR: I feel it no indiscretion to speak of my ‘convalescence’ since you have given it official existence. [Illustration] “May I therefore acknowledge the tender little glow of health induced by reading, as I sat here in the morning sun, the flattering attention paid me by your gentleman of ready wreath and quick biography. “I cannot, as I look at my improving self with daily satisfaction, really believe it all; still it has helped to do me good. And it is with almost sorrow that I must beg you, perhaps, to put back into its pigeon-hole, for later on, this present summary, and replace it with something preparatory--which, doubtless, you have also ready. “This will give you time, moreover, for some correction,--if really it be worth while. But certainly the ‘Little White Girl,’ which was not rejected at the Salon of ’63, was, I am forced to say, not ‘inspired by the following lines of Swinburne,’ for the one simple reason that those lines were only written, in my studio, after the picture was painted. And the writing of them was a rare and graceful tribute from the poet to the painter--a noble recognition of one work by the production of a nobler one. “Again, of ‘the many tales concerning the hanging, at the Academy, of the well-known portrait of the artist’s mother, now at the Luxembourg,’ one is true--let us trust your gentleman may have time to find it out--that I may correct it. I surely may always hereafter rely on the _Morning Post_ to see that no vulgar Woking joke reach me.