VANDELEUR. CHAPTER I. "Tis not the painted canvass I admire, ANONYMOUS. My friends and acquaintances consider me particularly deficient in what is commonly called "a taste for drawing;" which "taste" being rather prevalent in our family, the imputed want of it has been a source of not unfrequent mortification to me in my younger days. The half pettish, half contemptuous exclamation, "Oh no! not to her, she does not care for it, she has no taste for drawing," of some young VOL. I. B companion who had just suffered a pretty sketch to be wrested with gentle violence from her hands, and by thus excluding one poor luckless wight from the privilege of seeing it, at once affected displeasure, and gave permission to have it shown to all others, still rings in my ear; and I see myself seated at a little distance from the speakers, with book in hand, over the blazing fire, and shaking the foot that lay over the other, with all the nonchalance I could assume, sufficiently conscious of my own moral deficiency on the subject not to challenge the declaration made against me, yet sufficiently indignant at the wanton affront, to feel my cheek colour as much as the previous good offices of the fire would permit to become visible. And so poignant was my feeling on these occasions, that, when afterwards emancipated from the sweet thralls of home and childhood, I determined to try whether it was not possible for me, by industry and perseverance, to overcome this plaguespot in my education: but no, it would not do. I tried various kinds of drawing and painting, but never finished a piece that did not cause me more blushes, for falling so far short of my own conceptions, than even my former unambitious ignorance had done. Some, indeed, exclaimed in astonishment at the progress I made, and were even beginning to retract their former opinions of my deficiency: but it was all in vain-a painter I was not to be. I threw by my palette and my colours in utter disgust at my own attempts, and my friends once more triumphed in their superior judgment. Well, these days have long gone by, and I have passed on in my riper age as one "not fond of painting:" and yet, strange to say, I do not think it is possible that any individual can have felt more intense pleasure from the art than I have done in my time; but then it was in my own way, and at very rare intervals. I have stolen away at times and hours when I knew public and private collections of paintings to be least frequented by others, for the purpose of giving myself up to all the dreamy delight of a romance read in some speaking eye, or some tragedy in the haughty and revengeful lip. And if this blending of story and of painting was a sin against the latter, I can only say as I have said before, and as others have said for me, that "I have no taste for drawing." Of all the paintings, whether compositions or portraits, that have ever arrested my fancy or my feelings, I never remember to have been more irresistibly interested by any, than by three which are now (at least were, a very short time since,) to be seen in the picture-gallery of the Duchess of, in shire. They boast no foreign name, and are evidently of the modern school; but there is so much of truth, of nature that undefinable something about them, that I was impressed at once with the conviction that the subject was not merely fanciful. But if already I was inclined to admire them as, at least, masterpieces of very cunning workmanship from the pencil of an amateur, (as the artist was described in the catalogue to be,) most assuredly, when circumstances afterwards brought to my knowledge the outline of their history, with permission to weave it into a little tale, it did not lessen my interest in them, or dispose me to behold them with a more critical eye. The first of the three portraits which thus engaged my attention, was that of a young girl, apparently about fifteen or sixteen years of age, and a boy somewhat younger, whose arms fondly entwined around each other, as they appeared to stroll along, gave one the idea of what children born to our first parents before their fall might have been. You saw at a glance that they were not lovers; for, besides the early youth of the boy, there was a character about their love and their familiarity, that can be described best by negatives. It was free from all appearance of anxiety, free from all emotion, free from any of "love's delicious agonies." They looked as if they had just fallen from heaven together, and knew nothing yet of the ills of earth. Be |