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Of these valiant words Mr Browning's biographer says that “it is difficult to refer the Epilogue to a coherent mood of any period of its author’s life.” Perhaps she thinks the poet raved when he thus asserted his own lofty confidence—his cheerful anticipation of continued life and work and endeavour in the world to come. We are glad that we are not of her opinion. This trumpet, sounding out of the unseen, in high scorn of any ending, in assurance of triumphant continuance and all the joy of living, does not come without premeditation at what we call the end of the great poet’s career. It is his own summing up of what he had been and was yet—not in hope only, but full conviction and intention—to be.

The cheerful and cordial painter whose fragmentary sketches of himself and his time now lie before us,^[1] was not great either as an artist or a public man; but he is an excellent example of the school of painters now rapidly passing away—the early school of the Victorian age, good men and true, excellent citizens and most respectable Englishmen, who were irreproachable in all the relations of life, but not exactly calculated to hand down the tradition of art from one generation to another. Mr Redgrave had this in him, unlike the brethren of his kind, that he did not go on serenely painting mediocre pictures and exhibiting them “on the line” to the end of his days, but was withdrawn in middle-life into an official position, and therefore did not weary the public down to the last gasp of waning capability with his name. Nothing could exceed the cheerfulness and pleasantness of the view he affords of the profession of which he was always a most worthy member. It was not perhaps characterised by any enthusiastic devotion to art, but its friendliness, its good fellowship, its mild jokes and social amiability, could not be surpassed. The Academy, as represented in Mr Redgrave’s pages—as also in the ‘Reminiscences’ of Mr Frith,—is not perhaps so lofty and dignified as the outside public, accustomed to see it in its glory, among the flowers and plants and red cloth, receiving its guests at the top of the staircase at Burlington House, on its yearly festivities, might with awe imagine it to be—preoccupied with recondite questions of light and shade, and perspective and proportion, not to speak of all the mythologies and all the histories, Shakespeare and the musical glasses, from which its subjects are taken. Art is, in the showing of its followers, and in fact, as we know it in private life, the most cheerful of professions. Something tangible in its tools, the materials in which it works, the ever enlivening touch of manual work in which it has the advantage of literature for instance—help to give brightness to the atmosphere; and colour has a delight that is all its own, which satisfies the eye and the mind, altogether apart from the fact that it is or is not perfectly successful in expressing what is intended by the intellectual impulse. Indeed the most modern theory of art detaches it almost entirely from anything intellectual, treats subject with contempt, and makes the success of painting depend entirely on the harmony and beauty of composition and tone. In Mr