Of Leighton I had also written in those earlier articles in a manner perhaps that showed too little consideration for his great gifts and great accomplishments, but he was characteristically courteous in his reply to my request for some particulars of the days of his studentship, and the pains he had evidently taken to assist me as far as he could in the project I had in hand bears strong witness to that ungrudging demand he always made upon himself when any duty came before him. He wrote: [Illustration: _Hollyer_ LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A. From the painting by G. F. WATTS, in the National Portrait Gallery. _To face page 96._ ] _Thursday, Nov. 27, 1873._ DEAR SIR--I should have answered your letter sooner had I been more master of my time. I am divided between my readiness to serve you and my embarrassment as to how to satisfy your request concerning my past life of which you already possess the outline. I find on looking at _Men of the Time_ that the facts there given under my name are copied from the _Illustrated London News_, to which I furnished some such skeleton to accompany the customary portrait on my election to membership in the Royal Academy. They are accurate, barring misprints, such as calling my old friend Robert Fleury, Robert Henry. I hardly know what I can add without egotistic display to this account of a life in which, whilst there has been, and, as I hope, still is, steady growth and development, there had been no peripateia. I scarcely have any earlier recollection than a passionate wish and a firm purpose to be an artist, and having become one, I have never failed or swerved from my deep desire to leave behind me something in Art which should be not ignoble in its aim, and in which Form and Style, the highest attributes of Form, should be chiefly sought, and I may own to a hope, which has not been much fed by experience, that I might in some degree disseminate my artistic faith in this country where the seed is little and the soil rocky, and where what is to me vital and essential in Art is generally either repudiated or held a matter of obsolete dilettantism. The only apparent change in my work, the change from mediævalism to classicism, is in reality no change but only a development.