NORTHUMBERLAND 



about them ? And, indeed, how often does their 

 want of intimacy and sympathy hit you in the eye ! 

 Any one can paint the Thames, and the candid sense 

 of impotency which so frankly inserts a backwater of 

 that noble river in the heart of a quick-stream land- 

 scape seems almost commendable. But Mr. Sutton 

 Palmer can paint for the fisherman who knows about 

 these things, and has lived with them. One could 

 almost fish a pool over on his canvas, and know exactly 

 where to expect a rise. The woods and rocks and 

 moors through which his life-like rivers run are 

 those we see, and surely we ought to know. Per- 

 haps they are too realistic for the rules of Chelsea 

 studios ; but these shibboleths are nothing to us, and 

 have no significance for the lover of nature and those 

 intimate with rapid waters and their atmosphere. 

 And nature after all is a great deal more beautiful 

 and much more important than Art with the biggest 

 of A's. So when I look on Mr. Palmer's vistas of the 

 Ure and Swale, the Wharfe or Kibble, the pleasant 

 days on which I fished so much of them in fancy 

 without a rod comes very vividly back to me, and I 

 am grateful now for this, at the moment rather 

 tantalising deprivation. For it has endowed me with 

 a far more extended picture gallery of these beautiful 

 dales of the West Riding than I should possess had I 

 been able to concern myself with their trout. 



Of Derbyshire streams I have neither fished, nor 

 seen any but from the train, though the very edge 

 of that county I associate oddly enough with two as 

 pleasant days' trouting as I ever enjoyed in England. 

 This was at Welbeck many years ago in the duke's 



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