22 PRÆTERITA-I

Scottish nurse having always sung to me as we approached the Tweed or Esk,-

“For Scotland, my darling, lies full in thy view,

With her barefooted lassies, and mountains so blue,”¹

the idea of distant hills was connected in my mind with approach to the extreme felicities of life, in my Scottish aunt’s garden of gooseberry bushes, sloping to the Tay. But that, when old Mr. Northcote asked me (little thinking, I fancy, to get any answer so explicit) what I would like to have in the distance of my picture, I should have said “blue hills” instead of “gooseberry bushes,” appears to me-and I think without any morbid tendency to think over-much of myself-a fact sufficiently curious, and not without promise, in a child of that age.

16. I think it should be related also that having, as aforesaid, been steadily whipped if I was troublesome, my formed habit of serenity was greatly pleasing to the old painter; for I sat contentedly motionless, counting the holes in his carpet, or watching him squeeze his paint out of its bladders,-a beautiful operation, indeed, to my thinking;- but I do not remember taking any interest in Mr. North-cotes application of the pigments to the canvas; my ideas of delightful art, in that respect, involving indispensably the possession of a large pot, filled with paint of the brightest green, and of a brush which would come out of it soppy. But my quietude was so pleasing to the old man that he begged my father and mother to let me sit to him for the face of a child which he was painting in a classical subject; where I was accordingly represented as reclining on a leopard skin, and having a thorn taken out of my foot by a wild man of the woods.²

17. In all these particulars, I think the treatment, or

¹ [Quoted also in Fors, Letter 92: Vol. XXIX. p. 449.]

² [Plate III. For another reference to Northcote, see below, § 240 (p. 214). Dr. Birkbeck Hill makes Northcote a link in “the chain of genius,” tracing an “apostolic succession” from Dryden to Ruskin. Pope, when a boy of eleven, persuaded

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