GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
and of the Academy the schools are an integral part ; and since the 
interests of the students were very near his heart, some further 
reference to them may be pardoned by the reader. When I was 
there the butt of the Painting School was a tall, thin, old man, un- 
kempt, and unshaven, of whom tradition said that he had been there 
sixty years, having in his youth gained some prize that carried with 
it a life-studentship. However exaggerated this report, he was 
there, to my knowledge, long after I left—wearing, I am told, the 
same shabby, grey, coat, his sparse, grey locks no whiter, his grey, 
colourless face no cleaner—than he was in my day, when, as I 
distinctly remember, he was grey from head to foot! He always 
contrived to be in time to secure the best view of the model, and to- 
set up his easel where he could reserve a clear space between it and 
the window. Then, having dabbed some paint on his canvas, he 
would run backwards to judge at a distance of the effect, glance at 
the model, rush forward again, and implant another splash of 
pigment on the study, which somehow, nevertheless, never advanced 
at all; and he always used the same old canvas over again. He 
took no notice of anybody, and nobody interfered with his runs to 
and fro, for everybody gave him as wide a berth as possible; the 
men played practical jokes upon him, and left pails of water, soap 
and a towel near him. All this took place in the days when both 
sexes worked together in the costume-painting school, and the 
girls showed their disapproval of Mr. P—— by drawing their skirts 
aside when he came near them; but he remained superbly 
indifferent, and superlatively dirty! He looked eighty, though he 
was probably a quarter of a century younger, but he seemed to us, 
to even the kindest-hearted, an apt example of the survival of the 
unfittest. Nevertheless, it was round this curious specimen of 
fossilized humanity, that the late Mr. de Morgan has kindly thrown 
the mantle of romance, and made his dry bones live. It is impossible 
to read “‘ Alice for Short,” without perceiving that the character 
of Verrinder, whose devotion to his insane wife is a touching episode 
in. the story, was drawn from life, and that the original was “‘ Old 
p—.” If his history were really what de Morgan makes it, 
and had we known it, there was not a student among us but would 
have looked kindly on the old artist. 
At that time the R.A. Studentship, now shortened to five years, 
lasted to seven, if anyone cared to stay so long, which rarely 
804 
