Part 10 (2/2)

The as about to end and they were to be set adrift in a world they would find altogether strange

At this point, as though to cut the last thread of relation, six land The London climate had told on some of the family; the physicians prescribed a winter in Italy Of course the private secretary was detached as their escort, since this was one of his professional functions; and he passed sixan education as Italian courier, while the Civil War caot none, but he was a in all possible luxury, at soes and position, was a forhtful; Sorrento in winter offered hills to clirottoes to explore, and Naples near by to visit; Rome at Easter was an experience necessary for the education of every properly trained private secretary; the journey north by vettura through Perugia and Sienna was a dreaen Pass, if not equal to the Stelvio, orth seeing; Paris had always so to show The chances of accidental education were not so great as they had been, since one's field of experience had grown large; but perhaps a season at Baden Baden in these later days of its brilliancy offered soht of fashi+onable Europe and A the Duke of Haes by the conversation of Cora Pearl

The assassination of President Lincoln fell on the party while they were at Ro to that nursery ofeducated Again one went to meditate on the steps of the Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, but the lesson see happened The travellers changed no plan or movement The Minister did not recall them to London The season was over before they returned; and when the private secretary sat down again at his desk in Portland Place before a ed as to be beyond connection with the past His identity, if one could call a bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to remain; but his life was once more broken into separate pieces; he was a spider and had to spin a neeb in some new place with a new attachment

All his American friends and conteularly coet married and retire into back streets and suburbs until they could find e ho ho caerheads with the Senate, and found it best to keep things unchanged After the usual manner of public servants who had acquired the habit of office and lost the faculty of will, the ation in London continued the daily routine of English society, which, after beco a habit, threatened to becole taste with the young Englishmen of his ti up and down Rotten Row every day, on a hack, was not a taste, and yet was all the sport he shared Evidently he in a career of his own

Nothing was easier to say, but even his father admitted two careers to be closed For the law, diplomacy had unfitted him; for diplo the four most difficult years of American diplomacy, a position at the centre of action, with his hands actually touching the lever of power, could not beg a post of Secretary at Vienna or Madrid in order to bore hi until the next President should do hireed that diplomacy was not possible

In any ordinary system he would have been called back to serve in the State Department, but, between the President and the Senate, service of any sort became a delusion The choice of career was more difficult than the education which had proved impracticable Adams saw no road; in fact there was none All his friends were trying one path or another, but none went a way that he could have taken John Hay passed through London in order to bury hiations for years, before he drifted hoe Smalley on the Tribune Frank Barlow and Frank Bartlett carried Major-Generals' commissions into sinson, after a desperate struggle, was forced into State Street; Charles Ada to find employment Scores of others tried experiments more or less unsuccessful Henry Ada a hundred blunders; he could see no likely way of itimate success

Such as it was, his so-called education anted nowhere

One profession alone seemed possible--the press In 1860 he would have said that he was born to be an editor, like at least a thousand other young graduates fro the same conviction; but in 1866 the situation was altered; the possession of y was essential to get money

America had more than doubled her scale Yet the press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors Anyelse could write an editorial or a criticism The enormous mass of misinformation accumulated in ten years of nomad life could always be worked off on a helpless public, in diluted doses, if one could but secure a table in the corner of a newspaper office The press was an inferior pulpit; an anony-school but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education For the press, then, Henry Adaet practical training, he set to work to do what he could in London

He knew, as well as any reporter on the New York Herald, that this was not an A, and he knew a certain number of other drawbacks which the reporter could not see so clearly Do what he lish hts; he could breathe none other His e, since her success and popularity in England exceeded that of her husband--averred that every woland calishwoled Henry Adalish tone of h at heart h to rewMinister Adams became, in 1866, alether his own His old opponents disappeared Lord Palmerston died in October, 1865; Lord Russell tottered on six er, but then vanished from power; and in July, 1866, the conservatives came into office Traditionally the Tories were easier to deal with than the Whigs, and Minister Adae His personal relations were excellent and his personal weight increased year by year On that score the private secretary had no cares, and not h; the life he led was agreeable; his friends were all he wanted, and, except that he was at the mercy of politics, he felt much at ease

Of his daily life he had only to reckon so many breakfasts; so many dinners; so many receptions, balls, theatres, and country-parties; so many cards to be left; so many A A in sum, because, even if it had been his official duty--which it was not--it was le, continuous, unbroken act, which led to nothing and nowhere except Portland Place and the grave

The path that led solish habit of lish -rooo together, and could be arranged in any relation without ht dispute about innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate tastes no one, except perhaps a collie dog, has the right to doubt; least of all, the English; he drifts after them as unconsciously as a honey-bee drifts after his flowers, and, in England, every one lish-field; a feards books; one or two followed some form of science; and a number took to what, for want of a better na Adams inherited a certain taste for the same pursuit from his father who insisted that he had it not, because he could not see what his son thought he saw in Turner

The Minister, on the other hand, carried a sort of aesthetic rag-bag of his ohich he regarded as amusement, and never called art So he would wander off on a Sunday to attend service successively in all the city churches built by Sir Christopher Wren; or he would disappear froation day after day to attend coin sales at Sotheby's, where his son attended alternate sales of drawings, engravings, or water-colors

Neither knew enough to talk much about the other's tastes, but the only difference between theht difference of direction The Minister's s showed a correctness of form and line that his son would have been well pleased had he inherited

Of all supposed English tastes, that of art was theand treacherous Once drawn into it, one had small chance of escape, for it had no centre or circuin, no object, and no conceivable result as education In London one met no corrective The only A, was William Hunt, who stopped to paint the portrait of the Minister which now coe Hunt talked constantly, and was, or afterwards becah to learn Perhaps, too, he had inherited or acquired a stock of tastes, as young row Hunt had no time to sweep out the rubbish of Adams's mind The portrait finished, he went

As often as he could, Adaht out Richardson in his attic in the Rue du Bac, or wherever he lived, and they went off to dine at the Palais Royal, and talk of whatever interested the students of the Beaux Arts

Richardson, too, had much to say, but had not yet seized his style

Adaht very little of what lay in hisFrench was bad except the restaurants, while the continuous life in England made French art seelish art, in 1866, was good; far from it; but it helped to land

Not in the Legation, or in London, but in Yorkshi+re at Thornes, Adaarden of innate disorder called taste The older daughter of the Milnes Gaskells had rave Few Araves, but the faland at that day Old Sir Francis, the father, had been land, the only one as un-English; and the reason of his superiority lay in his name, which was Cohen, and his ed his narave in order to please his wife They had a band of relis; all of whom made their mark Gifford was perhaps the most eccentric, but his ”Travels” in Arabia were faeneration Francis Turner--or, as he was corave--unable to work off his restlessness in travel like Gifford, and stifled in the atmosphere of the Board of Education, became a critic His art criticisms helped to make the Saturday Review a terror to the British artist His literary taste, condensed into the ”Golden Treasury,”

helped Adaot frorave hiue As an art-critic he was too ferocious to be liked; even Hol ht to clai the most unpopular man in London; but he liked to teach, and asked only for a docile pupil Ada and liked to listen Indeed, he had to listen, whether he liked or not, for Palgrave's voice was strident, and nothing could stop hi, sculpture, architecture were open fields for his attacks, which were always intelligent if not always kind, and when these failed, he readily descended to rave's precise opposite, and whose Irish charm of touch and huht of Palgrave's call on him just after he had ton Square: ”Palgrave called yesterday, and the first thing he said was, 'I've counted three anachronise critic, also a poet, was Thorave in a society which resounded with eh assertion that Woolner hi supernatural effort to be courteous, but his busts were rerave's clamorous opinion, the best of his day He took the matter of British art--or want of art--seriously, alrievance and torture; at ti in the anarchistic wrath of his denunciation As Henry Adalish art, and had no American art to offer for sacrifice, he listened with enjoye much like Carlyle's, and accepted it without a qualroup, he fell in with Stopford Brooke whose tastes lay in the same direction, and whose expression wasthese men, one wandered off into paths of education much too devious and slippery for an Ao on the race-track, as far as concerned a career

Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an art-critic, still less an artist For soood, and art is one of the, and had not the trained eye or the keen instinct that trusted itself; but he was curious, as he went on, to find out how rave's word as final about a drawing of Reelo, and he trusted Woolner implicitly about a Turner; but when he quoted their authority to any dealer, the dealer pooh-poohed it, and declared that it had no weight in the trade If he went to a sale of drawings or paintings, at Sotheby's or Christie's, an hour afterwards, he saw these sarave or Woolner for a point, and bidding over theht a water-color from the artist himself out of his studio, and had it doubted an hour afterwards by the dealer to whose place he took it for fra He was reduced to admit that he could not prove its authenticity; internal evidence was against it

One ation in Portland Place on his way don, and offered to take Adas was on show The collection was rather a curious one, said to be that of Sir Anthony Westcomb, from Liverpool, with an undisturbed record of a century, but with nothing to attract notice Probably none but collectors or experts examined the portfolios So every sale, and especially on the lookout for old drawings, which becarave stopped at one containing several ss, one er on the Rafael, after careful examination; ”I should buy this,”

he said; ”it looks to s one day, and fifty pounds the next” Ada came down to the auction The nuo to lunch When he caone Much annoyed at his own stupidity, since Palgrave had expressly said he wanted the drawing for hiiven it to Adams, the culprit waited for the sale to close, and then asked the clerk for the name of the buyer It was Holloway, the art-dealer, near Covent Garden, who at once to the shop he waited till young Holloway came in, with his purchases under his arht to-day, Mr Holloway, a nu me have it?” Holloway took out the parcel, looked over the drawings, and said that he had bought the nuht possibly genuine; taking that out, Adaht have the rest for the price he paid for the lot--twelve shi+llings

Thus, down to that s Two of the at any price, and of these two, Palgrave chose the Rafael, Holloway the one marked as Re whatever on the subject, but thought he ht credit his, and call the drawing nothing Such iteher

He took the drawing to Palgrave It was closely pasted to an old, rather thin, cardboardit up to the , one could see lines on the reverse ”Take it down to Reed at the British Museus, and, if you ask him, he will have it taken off theRafael's works for the figure, which he found at last in the Parnasso, the figure of Horace, of which, as it happened--though Adams did not know it--the British Museu At last he took the dirty, little, unfinished red-chalk sketch to Reed whom he found in the Curator's rooing on the walls ”Yes!” said Mr Reed; ”I noticed this at the sale; but it's not Rafael!” Ada himself incorave, who said that Reed knew nothing about it Also this point lay beyond Adams's competence; but he noted that Reed was in the employ of the British Museum as Curator of the best--or nearly the best--collection in the world, especially of Rafaels, and that he bought for the Museum As expert he had rejected both the Rafael and the Reht, and after his attention was recalled to the Rafael for a further opinion he rejected it again

A week later, Ada, which Mr Reed took out of his drawer and gave hi hat seemed a little doubt or hesitation: ”I should tell you that the paper shoater-mark, which I kind the same as that of paper used by Marc Antonio” A little taken back by this norant Aht use as well as Rafael hienuine?” ”Possibly!”

replied Reed; ”but much overdrawn”