'The beauty of composition here is great, and you feel that
Michel's works are looked at fragment-wise in comparison. Here
the eye glides along so naturally, does so easily justice to
each part.'
LETTERS.
I fear the remark already made on that susceptibility to details
in art and nature which precluded the exercise of Margaret's sound
catholic judgment, must be extended to more than her connoisseurship.
She _had_ a sound judgment, on which, in conversation, she could fall
back, and anticipate and speak the best sense of the largest company.
But, left to herself, and in her correspondence, she was much the
victim of Lord Bacon's _idols of the cave_, or self-deceived by her
own phantasms. I have looked over volumes of her letters to me and
others. They are full of probity, talent, wit, friendship, charity,
and high aspiration. They are tainted with a mysticism, which to me
appears so much an affair of constitution, that it claims no more
respect than the charity or patriotism of a man who has dined well,
and feels better for it. One sometimes talks with a genial _bon
vivant_, who looks as if the omelet and turtle have got into his eyes.
In our noble Margaret, her personal feeling colors all her judgment
of persons, of books, of pictures, and even of the laws of the world.
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