It was not very long before his death that I paid my last visit to his studio, and although, as was his custom, the canvas upon which he was engaged was speedily wheeled round and turned with its face to the wall, I caught just a glimpse of his subject, which afterwards formed the matter of our talk. It was to be called “The Unknown Land,” and it is characteristic of the whole bent of his talent, and of the special way in which his imagination worked, that the last of his designs, left a mere fragment at the date of his death, was no more than a development of a drawing which he had contributed years before to the pages of _Once a Week_. But it is to be acknowledged that Walker was never prolific in his inventions in the ordinary sense of the term. Nothing is more remarkable in his gradual progress than the strong and enduring attachment he displayed to certain motives in composition that at first found expression in his boyhood. As his art advanced, this inspiration of his earlier days was taken up again and enforced with all the riper resources of his manhood. His great picture of “The Bathers” must have already been suggested to him by one of a series of illustrations representing the seasons which had also appeared in the pages of _Once a Week_, and many another instance might be cited which would tend to show the strong allegiance of his maturity to ideas which had first won his devotion as a boy. Mr. Leslie’s vivid sketch of Walker, and his just appreciation of his character, corresponds closely enough with the man as I knew him in the later days of his life. He seemed to me to be always to the last degree fastidious in his own judgment upon his work, and so exacting in his demands upon himself that I think it was from this source there sprang up the disinclination which he always showed to submitting his pictures to the criticism of others. The struggle he went through with himself in endeavouring to carry to a successful issue the thought that had formed in his brain was so severe that it left him, when the task was complete, with no courage to face an opinion which might, as he feared, be even less favourable than his own. But although he shunned any discussion upon pictures painted by himself, he was, as I recall him now, always eager and enthusiastic in his talk of the wider and more general ideals of Art, enthusiastic also in his occasional references to those among his contemporaries whom he specially admired. Looking back upon his achievement now, it is easy to perceive, and it would be folly not to acknowledge, that some of that higher beauty which he sought to find in those rustic subjects that were dear to him was occasionally imposed upon reality by a conscious and wilful reference to the beauty of the antique.