• THE DEWY MORN ' 247 



light up the brown mould. Altogether a realistic picture 

 painted in actual dark oak, actual brass, actual red cMna, 

 and actual yellow flowers. 



' Here then there was art in the man. Can you put 

 that taste in by hanging a picture on the wall ? Letitia's 

 pictures were chiefly of the pre-Raphaelite ecclesiastical 

 order — saints, saints' lives and deaths, such as were 

 painted in the fourteenth century, and with which life at 

 the present day has no sort of sympathy. 



' There was not a cottage-tenant on the estate of 

 Cornleigh who could call his cottage his own securely 

 for more than six months. How, then, was it possible 

 for taste to grow up, or to exercise itself if it was there ? 



' There can be no art in a people who know that at any 

 moment they may be thrust out of doors. Art is of slow- 

 growth. 



' Up in the north they say there is a district where the 

 labourers spend their idle hours in cutting out and 

 sticking together fiddles. I do not care twopence for a 

 fiddle as a fiddle ; but still I think if a labouring man 

 coming home from plough, and exposure to rough wind, 

 and living on coarse fare, can still have spirit enough left 

 to sit down and patiently carve out bits of maple wood 

 and fit them together into a complete and tunable fiddle, 

 then he must have within him some of the true idea of art, 

 and that fiddle is in itself a work of art. 



' Nothing of the sort will ever be possible in our cottage 

 homes till the people in them know that they can live 

 therein as long as they please provided they pay the rent, 

 and are not liable to be ordered off into the next county or 

 anywhere because they have displeased someone.'* 



He laughs at the great new Maasbury Church that was 

 to replace the little old one, and to give the ' shaven 

 advisers ' the profit of the social influence gained by such 

 a change. But Jefferies never knew nor cared much 

 about the church, whether he praised it as a youth or 

 scorned it in his maturity. The scorn was better than 



* The Dewy Morn. 



