I should be sorry to live in a house
that contained one of them. The best thing of Haydon was a hasty dash of
a sketch for a small, full-length portrait of Wordsworth, sitting on the
crag of a mountain. I doubt whether Wordsworth's likeness has ever been
so poetically brought out. This gallery is altogether of modern
painters, and it seems to be a receptacle for pictures by artists who can
obtain places nowhere else,--at least, I never heard of their names
before. They were very uninteresting, almost without exception, and yet
some of the pictures were done cleverly enough. There is very little
talent in this world, and what there is, it seems to me, is pretty well
known and acknowledged. We don't often stumble upon geniuses in obscure
corners.
Leaving the gallery, we wandered through the rest of the bazaar, which is
devoted to the sale of ladies' finery, jewels, perfumes, children's toys,
and all manner of small and pretty rubbish. . . . . In the evening I
again sallied forth, and lost myself for an hour or two; at last
recognizing my whereabouts in Tottenham Court Road. In such quarters of
London it seems to be the habit of people to take their suppers in the
open air. You see old women at the corners, with kettles of hot water
for tea or coffee; and as I passed a butcher's open shop, he was just
taking out large quantities of boiled beef, smoking hot. Butchers'
stands are remarkable for their profuse expenditure of gas; it belches
forth from the pipes in great flaring jets of flame, uncovered by any
glass, and broadly illuminating the neighborhood.
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