other left off, there is no doubt that to Charles much of that fine figuredrawing and grouping invention was due, which placed the name of "J. F. Herring Senior" at the top in pastoral, as it was already in race-horse subjects. Amid other labours, they repainted Eclipse, and the old man took his part with much zeal in that controversy which rages at intervals over his bones.

Camberwell, where he became a most active shower of Fancy Pigeons and Rabbits, was the next place at which he pitched his tabernacle after Six-Mile Bottom, and he chose Meopham Park, a very pretty spot and about 1 miles from Tonbridge by the fields, about ten years since. After that he would never leave home to paint. He did not put his hand latterly to a coaching picture; but his coachman's eye did not rest, till he had made the avenue as perfect a surface as Telford ever planned. His entire enjoyment of the spot was not long-lived, as in the June of '56 his son Charles died, and the loss almost broke his heart. Still he went back to his now desolate easel once more, and tried to forget his sorrow in devising new pictures, horse fairs, farm-yards, and maternities, and occasionally painting some of his older works with variations. He delighted most in repainting the cracks of his portfolio, and the breeders who wished to have a pictured line of the ancestry of a favourite horse or mare knew whom to fall back upon. His industry, like his punetaality and love of order, was intense. At night he would ask his daughters to play to him, and worked at times almost into the short hours. His расе, like Mr. Dickens's writing out of shorthand notes, was miraculous, and on one occasion he painted a dog into a friend's picture on the Suffolk-street glazing day, in exactly 7 minutes.

Asthma, combined with heart complaint, began to creep on with years, and since '62, he had not been outside his gates, and merely drove himself occasionally in a donkey-chair round his walks. His nerve had very much failed him before that, and old coachman as he was, it made him quite fidgetty if he saw the horse going a little fresh in his brougham. He was a great herbalist, and had done much for friends in cases of neuralgia, but he could get no relief for himself. "You will see me reduced five or six stone, and not a stout part about me except what dropsy touches," were his words in a letter to us early in August, and we felt it must be too true, when we noted how shaky and uncertain his once "fine Roman hand," which was wont to deal in such flourishing signatures, had become at last. We spent an afternoon with him the Saturday but one before he died, but as he did not rise from his chair, and his shoulders were covered, the change was not so marked, and we hoped there was some life for him yet. His once fine memory for racing dates had failed him, and more than once we had to refer to Johnson's Calen dar; but we remember how fondly he pointed to Dr. Syntax, and recalled how Filho beat him for the Richmond Gold Cup, after being on his knees near the Grey Stone, and with what certainty he laid it down that "Blacklock had a soft spot in him." He was so weak, we were told, that he could hardly support himself by the table, and on the next evening when his brother came, and he tried with all his old fire" Soon shall the Evening Star with silver ray," he could only get through one verse, and then they heard his voice in song no more. He was very cheerful during the three hours we were with him, and sat in

his library-chair, with Whalebone just above his head, and Teddington and Dr. Syntax on the walls. Stockwell, Birdcatcher, Glaucus, Foiga-Ballagh, Sultan, and some others were all standing finished in another room, and Priam had been just dashed in. He knew that he was sinking; but we hardly thought, as we bade him goodbye, and gave our promise to come back very shortly, and tell him all about Doncaster (to which we were bound), that our leave-taking was the last.

For the whole of the next week, he worked, if it was only an hour or two a day, with the brush; and on the Tuesday before his death he contrived to do a little on a horse's head. Then he laid his palette aside, and told his wife, when he had been helped back from his studio, that he should never paint more. For two years he had hardly gone to bed, and rested as he could, either in his easy-chair or on the sofa. His last night was restless to a degree, and spent in walking between his two rooms; but at nine o'clock in the morning he lay down on his bed and never rose again. Bidding his wife and daughters good-bye a little before midnight, he made one last request that he should be moved into the middle of the bed, and that the curtain should be drawn to exclude the light. He then, calmly and unseen, laid himself out for death, and when the curtain was drawn back he was gone without even a sigh. They buried him at Hildenborough Church, in the same grave with his son Charles. We had come the next Saturday according to our promise to visit him, and we were only in time for his funeral. It was in the height of the autumnal summer; the hoppers had gone back, with the clothes bundle and the potatokettle, singing and shouting to their London lair, the fields were one mass of stripped and dying bines, and the graceful hop tresses which had clung three weeks before round the empty sign frame, to whose keeping Boniface grudged the Flying Dutchman which his old neighbour had painted for him, were all gathered and gone. There were few save the mourners to look into that grave; but it was passing strange to note how everything seemed to combine in support of the truth, that "the artist never dies." The Alderneys and the Cochins had grouped themselves in the glebe hard by the rectory garden. As the hearse wound slowly up the high road towards the church, a drove of horses going to Croydon Fair preceded it. They passed the churchyard wall, the man on the foremost horse leading five with plaited manes and tails, seven or eight more in Indian file, some running wide or stopping to crop a blade of grass, and then five more with another "Happy Joe" on the leader in the rear. The Horse had been his idol in life, and there it was, bearing its unconscious part in his funeral procession. Then, again, as the coffin paused under the lych gate, the road seemed alive with studies, which he had made his own. The butcher boy left his cart in the middle of the road, and leant watching the scene with his arms on the churchyard wall; the huckster's van was standing at the village shop, and in the distance the heavy hopladen waggon was toiling along, with the Flying Horse of Kent as its bag token.

The room where he died was in some measure an index to his favourite pictures, and engravings of "The Baron's Charger" (the original of

which was fost in the Atlantic), "The Frugal Meal," "Refreshment," "The Temperance Society," and "The Horses of the Sun, were there with "Labour" above the door leading to his studio, and "Rest" beside his bed. Attila, Crucifix, and Surplice were among the 20 to 30 single paintings which he left, and the larger ones are the Cattle and the Horse Fair, the Shoeing, and a Farm-yard, with one of Alderman Copeland's ponies, the gem of the group. Five or six large pictures were still unfinished. One of them, Deerstalking, with two magnificent deer hounds in it, singu. larly enough, only lacked a day's work or so on the white horse, which he must have left as a bonne bouche. A Hawking Scene was pretty well advanced; so was a copy of the Cracks Charging a Wall belonging to Lord Strathmore (of whose death they never told him); but a future Horse Fair and Farm-yard were not fully sketched in. The last picture he worked at was a small one for a neighbour, of two horses' heads at a fountain. The bay's head was finished, and an hour or two more would have completed the white. It was with a white horse that his spurs were first won, and a white one claimed his last touches. During his whole painting life, he had only used one colour-knife, a green-handled one, with its edges worn away by use till they were quite sharp. It stood there with his palette and brushes just as he had left them, in a studio which was always the pink of order, with his brushes tied up in quite a small sheaf on the table, his models on the chimney-piece, and his letters all docketed and indorsed. Still nothing had more interest for us than the portfolio of sketches, which will be sold with the other pictures at Christie's during the winter. There are drawings of nearly all his leading race-horses, as well as tracings of them, and Eastern studies, many of them coloured, for "The Overland Mail." One of the best small horse pictures he ever painted represents an Arab on a jewel of a horse at Jacob's Well, and was presented by him to one of his daughters, Mrs. Geo. Warner. Farm-yard sketches are there in profusion, with frightened hens and fearless ducklings; and so are the original trial sketches of the Royal Arab Said, with three different back-grounds, paddock, field, and Eastern camp, the latter of which was chosen by Her Majesty for the picture. The coaching sketches are few, but we found a large-sized recollection of the Old Doncaster Round-house, and the Grand Stand as well. Mango and Sam Day junior is the only sketch of a horse or jockey. The match gig, one of the most wonderful pieces of foreshortening he ever achieved, is there; and so are the original designs for "Duncan's Horses." Pantaloon is favoured with two heads, one listening, the other at a trough. Cocks and hens feed at the back of Priam's, who is described as "a narrow and rather flatsided horse." Velocipede at three is a reading we have not yet met with, and his dam forms the centre of a five mare pencil group. For spirit there is nothing to beat " Horses terrified at the Sea-side," and "Pumped Out." There is also a design for "The Council of Horses, which was never painted, and for Steeplechase Horses at the Post, which suffered the same fate. They are, in short, the patient varied gatherings of a whole life-time, and the germs of a reputation which will never die while the "White Horse of the Saxons holds sway from the Tweed to

the Tamar."

THE LAST OF THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS.

BY UNCLE SCRIBBLE.

When I took my degree the Grand Tour was a great thing. There was the Rhine to be done, and Switzerland, and certainly the north of Italy Paris and Naples, at either end of the performance, were left for the haute noblesse. The common people and the middle classes, as they were then called, stopped at home altogether. There are no middle classes now. There was not much profit in travelling in those days, for it was done at a vast sacrifice of time and convenience; but there was much glory. We posted everywhere. We posted to Dover, and engaged a calêche at Calais; or we sailed from London, and reached Antwerp in a state of coma at the end of some eight-and-forty hours. Then we boarded the Rhine somewhere about Cologne, and did it all the Drachenfels and Nonnenwerth, St. Goar, Bingen, Coblentz, and Ehrenbreitstein. At Lucerne we halted many days; Mannheim, Basle, and Strasbourg having been lionized on the road. What wretched accommodation! What clanking of whips! What bowing and scraping of landlords! What passport-visèing and custom-house extortion! What endless troubles and delays! We were verily the lords of all we saw, the practical monarchs of all we surveyed. Nobody travelled but Milord Anglais-nobody was beautiful but Miladi Anglaise. Nowhere was there a harvest like that of the Perfide Albion! How they hated us! but how they licked our feet! The great class of "Vautour Albergiste," the "Vultur Tabernarius" of Buffon, fed upon our vitals. He had a nominal charge for his compatriots, an ascending scale for the French and Russians, and one already at the summit for the confiding Englishman. "Point d'argent, point de suisse." "Odi profanum vulgus:" in those days it was something to have approached the foot of Mont Blanc, for we never went up it, and to have shared the hospitality of Mount St. Bernard.

In all this there was a distinction and a privilege which no longer exists. A travelled monkey was a travelled monkey after all: he was something more than the monkey who had never been out of his own country, and carried his tail considerably higher, unless he had cut it off altogether. I think it may be conceded that the Grand Tour nevertheless had its advantages. It did not make of a fool a wise man: it did not open the eyes of the blind: but it ran the risk of removing prejudice, unless (as in some peculiar cases) it was so happy as to strengthen them. To be sure, in the event of a man knowing nothing of his own country, the comparison of it with foreign lands would not be valuable; and to one who was ignorant of the politics of England, the consideration of strange governments must have been a hard nut. Still, these were not usually the men selected for foreign travel; and when a young gentleman of very moderate capacity issued from the domestic portal for the purpose of enriching his mind, he was usually accompanied by the family tutor, who was enabled to prevent him from cutting his throat on the steps of a Kursaal, or committing enormities for which we haye occasionally to blush.

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Yes I think the Grand Tour had its advantages. Have they descended to our own times?

Towards the middle or end of July you may walk down Bond-street, Regent-street, or Piccadilly, and at least nine-tenths of the respectable classes are going abroad. By the way, I never could understand why the middle classes of society should enjoy this especial privilege of respectability! What I have written about this travelling mania does not apply so much to the upper class of society, nor indeed at all to the very low. It has an appearance of pretension about it which the former stands in no need of, and which the latter can scarcely assume. Why Smythe is going to the Continent it would be difficult to say. He knows nothing of his own country; very little, beyond the Times newspaper, of its literature. He is not more conversant with French than he was with Latin or Greek, when he left a third-rate school to go into the Tonnage and Poundage Office at a salary of five-and-sixpence a-day. Certainly his family have no wish that he should make the Grand Tour as it is made now-a-days; still less that he should make it as formerly. But he has just heard that it is the right thing to do. Every man ought to be able to say that he has been abroad; and every man can say it who is not deaf and dumb. This sacrifice on the altar of truth is not so troublesome as the journey, and is very little more of a falsehood than the specious pretences which are alleged as the reason for going.

It does not take long to pack up a portmanteau, to buy a knapsack, or to select a wonderful self-coloured suit, without which I find the pleasures of travelling are much diminished.

The grand thing is to get to Strasbourg as quickly as may be. You must pass through Paris; but it will be unnecessary to pay more than a flying visit to so insignificant a capital, and which at this particular season has sent all its population to Baden or Homburg. This tribute to the temptations of that city is well bestowed, unless Smythe has a strength of mind or purse above common. Both will be put in requisition; and I recommend a postponement of the visit until your return, when you may have happily placed it beyond your power to give way by your flattering consistency in backing the colour. I advise this more especially if there be a Mrs. Smythe and a sister-in-law.

Strasbourg of course you see-that is, en passant, the exterior of the cathedral. There are no passports required for Englishmen, and possibly your French may, as I have had cause to remark, have retained a tinge, a mere soupçon, of the Anglo-Saxon element. Be as troublesome as you can over your baggage. The train will give time for every part of your limited wardrobe to be turned out and put back again; not, indeed, with the care which an affectionate mother or family-nurse may have bestowed upon it, but sufficiently for all purposes of your toilette, till you reach the Austrian frontier. The French are a polite people, but Alsace has not yet taken a leaf out of their book. After being shaken-up by your journey on the Paris and Strasbourg railway (and I never travel on it without having a newly-married couple, after having had their heads knocked well together, shot into me), you find that you had better have gone to Basle; because there really is nothing to do there, excepting the balcony at the hotel, and one evening will suffice for that. As to looking at a church, have you