He had not been a moral painter like Hogarth or Sir Noel Paton, nor a worshipper of classic legend and beauty like the unique Leighton.

He had openly scorned England.

He had never lived in England.
He had avoided the Royal Academy, honouring every country save his own.
And was he such a great painter, after all?
Was he anything but a clever dauber whose work had been forced into general admiration by the efforts of a small clique of eccentric admirers?
Far be it from them, the organs, to decry a dead man, but the National Valhalla was the National Valhalla....

And so on.
The penny evening papers were pro-Farll, one of them furiously so.

You gathered that if Priam Farll was not buried in Westminster Abbey the penny evening papers would, from mere disgust, wipe their boots on Dover cliffs and quit England eternally for some land where art was understood.