I am colouring the sketch of my cartoon, and will get it all right, I think, but it is the most difficult part. The figure of the Knight in brown burnished armour looks splendid now it is coloured: it is not the sketch for sending in that I am doing. I have been drawing from the model a great deal also, and will soon get through all that, but will not have time to paint the _Banks and Braes of Bonny Doune_. I am altogether pleased with my work, and am doing it more carefully than I did the last cartoon; but am not so satisfied with the quantity I have done these few last days, I seem to have so many things to do.... Mr. Lucy is very kind and mightily taken with me and you, which is as well as otherwise. What lies you wrote about their child! I have now told you pretty near all. God bless you, my dear Wife, and bless our child.... Your affectionate hubby, FORD M. BROWN. * * * * * MADOX BROWN’S DIARY, 1847 TO 1856. Brown seems to have first begun keeping a Diary on 4th September 1847. I possess five copy-book sections of this Diary, going on (but with considerable intervals when the day-by-day work was neglected) up to 6th January 1856. Later sections are in the possession of Mr. Ford Hueffer, and have been used in his book entitled _Ford Madox Brown_. I have said elsewhere that, had I at the proper time been conscious of housing the earlier sections, I should at once have placed them at his disposal--but I never knew anything about them until October 1896, when the above-named Biography was already fully in type. I am satisfied that the reader, conversant with art-matters, will find a good deal of interest in my extracts from the Diary, offhand though they mostly are: these form perhaps hardly a half of the whole. The footnotes are always mine. When the name Lucy occurs the reader should be on his guard to remember that it sometimes means Brown’s daughter Lucy, but more generally the Painter Charles Lucy. Brown was punctilious in noting down at the end of each day the number of hours during which he had been occupied in actual professional work. Taking at random the month of November 1847, I find the total to be 171¼ hours, or upwards of 5 hours per day. This, allowing for interruptions, meals, and demands upon him for other than artistic purposes, is a good tale of diligence: but at some other periods the numbers of hours was much larger--we read of 10 hours, 12, and even on occasion 15 and 18. * * * * * 4 September 1847.