of the old and disused graveyard, with its huge hawthorn trees and its inclosure of the parsonage appendages, as peaceful and as far from the world as if it had been in distant Devon. My letter to Mr. Hall led to introductions to Leslie, Harding, Creswick, and several minor painters, all of whom found me attentive to the lessons they gave me on their own excellences and led me no farther, but it also brought me into contact with a painter of a higher and more serious order, J.B. Pyne, one of the few thinkers and impartial critics I found amongst the English painters. Every Sunday I went out to Pyne's house in Fulham, walking the six or seven miles in the morning and spending the day there. Kitchen-gardens and green fields then lay between Kensington and Fulham where are now the museums, and there the larks sang and the hawthorn bloomed. After an early dinner we passed the afternoon in talk on art and artists. Pyne was one of the best talkers on art I ever knew, and a critic of very great lucidity; his art had great qualities and as great defects, but in comparison with some of the favorites of the public of that day he was a giant, and in certain technical qualities he had no equal in his generation except Turner. He had the dangerous tendency, for an artist, of putting everything he did under the protection and direction of a theory--a course which invariably checks the fertility of technical resource, and which in his case had the unfortunate effect of causing him to be regarded as a mere theorist, whose work was done by line and rule. But I had good reason to know that Turner thought more highly of him than the English public, and I am convinced that as time goes on and his pictures acquire the mellowness of tone for which he carefully calculated in his method and choice of material, he will be more highly esteemed than in his own time, and that the careful and systematic technique which characterized his work, and which is so opposed to the random and hypothetically inspired methods that are the admiration of a half-educated public, will find its true appreciation in the future.