But when of water-colour work I sing,
Let me an artist to your notice bring:
Rare Arthur Melville, of achievement bright,
Who makes the card-board pulse with living light;
Whose Spanish bull-fights and whose Arab scenes
Reveal his perfect grip of all the means
That go to make the product that's unique —
The toil-won triumph that the masters seek.

Ere Cosmo Monkhouse writes another book
To blind our sense, and bait the trader's hook,
With praise of English water-colour schools,
Let him acquire the water-colour rules:
Go learn that stippling is less used of late,
And teach his pen its ardour to abate
When praising groups whose pale and feeble style
Beside the master's would evoke a smile.
Let Prout and others fade in fameless night —
Those frigid ones who freeze Monkhouse's sight —
And let him study surer work and ways
And learn to mete the living genius praise.

This trick of waiting till a man is dead
To twine the trailing laurel for his head,
Smacks of the worldly-wise, who wish to know
A picture's " moral" ere they praise bestow.
Yet, as the subject has been brought to view,
I may, perhaps, delight the pious few
In stating, by the way, that Melville's strong
And shuns the sinfulness of painting wrong.
I might applaud his colour, rich as wine,
His " one-touch" rendering of tone and line —
A touch unerring, charged of subtle force,
That's never commonplace and never coarse —
But this is needless, for he's made his place
Both as a painter and a man of grace
Whose brush sheds beauty as the sun sheds fire,
A man Archdeacon Farrar could admire;
Altho' his style might not archdeacons strike,
For Holman Hunt and Melville paint unlike.