CHAPTER XVIII.
APOLOGIES.
We must now describe the place to which Hope conducted his daughter, and please do not skip our little description.

It is true that some of our gifted contemporaries paint Italian scenery at prodigious length _a propos de bottes_, and others show in many pages that the rocks and the sea are picturesque objects, even when irrelevant.

True that others gild the evening clouds and the western horizon merely to please the horizon and the clouds.

But we hold with Pope that "The proper study of mankind is man," and that authors' pictures are bores, except as narrow frames to big incidents.

The true model, we think, for a writer is found in the opening lines of "Marmion," where the castle at even-tide, its yellow lustre, its drooping banner, its mail-clad warders reflecting the western blaze, the tramp of the sentinel, and his low-hummed song, are flung on paper with the broad and telling touch of Rubens, not from an irrelevant admiration of old castles and the setting sun, but because the human figures of the story are riding up to that sun-gilt castle to make it a scene of great words and deeds.
Even so, though on a much humbler scale, we describe Hope's cottage and garden, merely because it was for a moment or two the scene of a remarkable incident never yet presented in history or fiction.
This cottage, then, was in reality something between a villa and a cottage; it resembled a villa in this, that the rooms were lofty, and the windows were casements glazed with plate glass and very large.