374 PRÆTERITA-II

together, the four of us;-Boxall, Harding, and I extremely embarrassing Mrs. Jameson by looking at everything from our pertinaciously separate corners of an equilateral triangle. Mrs. Jameson was absolutely without knowledge or instinct of painting (and had no sharpness of insight even for anything else); but she was candid and industrious, with a pleasant disposition to make the best of all she saw, and to say, compliantly, that a picture was good, if anybody had ever said so before. Her peace of mind was restored in a little while, by observing that the three of us, however separate in our reasons for liking a picture, always fastened on the same pictures to like; and that she was safe, therefore, in saying that, for whatever other reason might be assigned, other people should like them also.

I got some most refined and right teaching from Mr. Boxall; of which I remember as chiefly vital, his swift correction of my misgiven Wordsworth’s line-

“So be it when I shall grow old,”¹

as-

“So shall it be when I grow old.”

I read Wordsworth with better care and profit ever afterwards; but there was this much of reason for that particular mistake, that I was perfectly confident in my own heart’s love of rainbows to the end, and felt no occasion to wish for what I was so sure would be.

144. But Mr. Boxall’s time, and Harding’s, were at end before I had counted and described all the Tintorets in Venice, and they left me at that task, besides trying to copy the Adoration of the Magi on four sheets of brown paper.² Things had gone fairly well as long as Harding took me out to sea every afternoon; but now, left to myself, trying to paint the Madonna and Magi in the

¹ [For other references to Wordsworth’s poem on the rainbow (“My heart leaps up when I behold”), see Vol. XVIII. pp. 163, 165.]

² [The Plate here given (XXVI.) is of another study made at this time, from Tintoret’s Crucifixion.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]