Rat-holes and Rhapsody.

Art is not necessarily the prescriptive prerogative of the apostles of paint, pen, or pencil. Time was when “Artists” encouraged the error that Art alternated between an attic and “uncle's”; that Art was an altitudinous bewitchment of the brain, which made mal-nutrition a magnificent gesture to genius; that starvation and inspiration, long hair and short rations, rat-holes and rhapsody, despair and debt, represented the argent of Art. But torrential Time, or “tempest fugit,” has altered the armorial aureola of Art from “a sausage sizzling over a candle dripping” to “horse-sense rampant on a field of ideas.” For it is not necessary to gloom in a garret, and paint pictures professing to portray “prunes at play” or “Eros with earache,” which look more like an accident in an eggery.