The great picture stood opposite to the door, and Mrs. Champernowne sank silently into a low chair which the painter had placed for her at some little distance from the easel. It was a perfect feast of colour, a banquet of beauty. The painter had chosen for his subject the humiliation of the Carthaginian queen at the feet of her lover. Dido has heard of the Trojan's intended departure, and the first storm of passion has spent itself. She has come to implore him to remain; she came to reproach him for his cruelty, but love has been stronger than indignation, and in her tears and her passion she has fallen prostrate at his feet, her hands clasped, her eyes uplifted to his thoughtful face, her golden hair falling about her in a glittering shower, her regal mantle of white and gold streaming on the ground as she kneels. There are real tears in her blue eyes, so deep in their violet shadow, so brilliant in their light. You see the traces of tears that she has dashed away with an impassioned hand, still glittering on the golden fringe of her lashes; and in every articulation of the intertwined fingers, in the convulsive contraction of the lovely lips, the lines that wrinkle the ivory brow, you behold the evidences of her despair. William Crawford's Dido is no beautiful doll, but a living, breathing woman, sublimely lovely in her womanly anguish. Æneas, disturbed and compassionate, but still resolute, has only a secondary interest in the picture. He is listening, and will speak presently; and you feel that he will be courteous, and tender, and gentlemanly, in his answer to that fond, appealing creature. But the passion and the despair are Dido's and the interest of the picture is hers. In every detail of his great work William Crawford had shown himself a poet as well as a painter. The atmosphere was not of Kensington, but of Carthage. It was evening; and athwart barbaric pillars you saw the sun going redly down behind a waveless sea, while far above dim stars glimmered in an opal-tinted sky. A faint languorous mist crept over the purple distance; but the foreground of the picture was one glow of gorgeous colour. The tessellated pavement on which the queen of Carthage knelt was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and gold, curtains of strangely-mingled hues trailed from the cornices of the chamber, revealing glimpses of a wall covered with broad bands of black and red. The gaudy plumage of strange birds made a confusion of colour amidst the purple cushions of a low couch that filled a niche in the curtained wall, and the western sunlight was reflected redly on the water in a shallow basin of jasper and onyx, over the margin of which hung a woman's embroidered garment.