their vein, go on working it.  They do not wander off in search of new veins, as a general rule.  It would be unkind to draw attention to personal proofs of this truism.  He who has done well with babies in fancy dresses will go on doing well with infants in masquerade.  There are moments when the arrival of Cronus to swallow the whole family of painted babes, as he did his own, would be not unwelcome; when an artistic Herod would be applauded for a general massacre of the Burlington House innocents.  But this may be only the jaundiced theory of a jaded critic.  The mothers of England are a much more important set of judges, and they like the babies.  Then the bishops, though a little monotonous, must be agreeable to their flocks; while the hunting dogs, and pugs, and kittens, and monks, and Venetian girls—­la blonde et la brune—­and the Highland rivers of the colour of porter “with a head on it,” and the mackerel-hued sea, and the marble, and the martyrs, and the Mediterranean—­they are all dear to various classes of our teeming population.  The critic may say he has seen them all before, he knows them off by heart; but then so does he know Raphael’s infants, and Botticelli’s madonnas, and Fra Angelico’s angel trumpeters, and Vecelli’s blue hills, and Robusti’s doges, and Lionardo’s smiling, enigmatic ladies.  He does not say he is tired of these, but that is only his eternal affectation.  He is afraid, perhaps, to say that the old masters bore him—­that is a compliment reserved for contemporaries.  Let it be admitted that in all ages artists have had their grooves, like other men, and have reproduced themselves and their own best effects.  But, as this is inevitably true, how careful they should be that the effects are really of permanent value and beauty!  Realistic hansom cabs, and babies in strange raiment, and schoolgirls of the last century, and Masters of Hounds, are scarcely of so much permanent value as the favourite types and characters which Lionardo and Carpaccio repeat again and again.  We no more think Claude monotonous than we think “the quiet coloured end of evening” flat and stale.  But we may, and must, tire of certain modern combinations too often rehearsed, after the trick has become a habit, and the method an open mystery.

THE DRY FLY.

As the Easter vacation approaches, the cockney angler, the “inveterate cockney,” as Lord Salisbury did or did not say, begins to look to his fishing tackle.  Now comes in the sweet of the year, and we may regret, with Mr. Swinburne, that “such sweet things should be fleet, such fleet things sweet.”  There are not many days that the London trout-fisher gets by the waterside.  The streams worth his attention, and also within his reach, are few, and either preserved so that he cannot approach them, or harried by poachers as well as anglers.  How much happier were men in Walton’s day who stretched their legs up Tottenham Hill and soon found, in the