new-fashionedness, all this array is really less like a new thing than the
last surviving result of all the more lightsome adornments of past times.
Only, the very walls seem to cry out:--No! to make delicate insinuation,
for a music, a conversation, nimbler than any we have known, or are likely
to find here. For himself, he converses well, but very sparingly. He
assures us, indeed, that the "new style" is in truth a thing of old days,
of his own old days here in Valenciennes, when, working long hours as a
mason's boy, he in fancy reclothed the walls of this or that house he was
employed in, with this fairy arrangement--itself like a piece of
"chamber-music," methinks, part answering to part; while no too trenchant
note is allowed to break through the delicate harmony of white and pale
red and little golden touches. Yet it is all very comfortable also, it
must be confessed; with an elegant open place for the fire, instead of
the big old stove of brown tiles. The ancient, heavy furniture of our
grandparents goes up, with difficulty, into the garrets, much against my
father's inclination. To reconcile him to the change, Antony is painting
his portrait in a vast perruque and with more vigorous massing of light
and shadow than he is wont to permit himself.


June 1714.

He has completed the ovals:--The Four Seasons. Oh! the summerlike grace,
the freedom and softness, of the "Summer"--a hayfield such as we visited
to-day, but boundless, and with touches of level Italian architecture in
the hot, white, elusive distance, and wreaths of flowers, fairy hayrakes
and the like, suspended from tree to tree, with that wonderful lightness
which is one of the charms of his work. I can understand through this, at
last, what it is he enjoys, what he selects by preference, from all that
various world we pass our lives in. I am struck by the purity of the room