of whom the one was a man who smiled seldom, wept often, prayed constantly, and never harboured an impure thought. His pictures are simply so many pieces of jewellery, the colour of the draperies being perfectly pure, as various as those of a painted window, chastened only by paleness, and relieved upon a gold ground. Salvator was a dissipated jester and satirist, a man who spent his life in masquing and revelry. But his pictures are full of horror, and their colour is for the most part gloomy grey. Truly it would seem as if art had so much eternity in it that it must take its dye from the close rather than the course of life; 'in such laughter the heart of man is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness'" (_Modern Painters_, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iv. See also vol. i. pt. i. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 9; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. § 21; vol. v. pt. ix. ch. viii. § 14. _Stones of Venice_, vol. ii. ch. v. § 31. For a full record of fact and romance about this painter, see Lady Morgan's interesting _Life and Times of Salvator Rosa_; London, 1855). An illustration of Æsop's fable of the dishonest woodman who, hearing of the reward which an honest fellow-labourer had obtained from Mercury for not claiming either the gold or silver axe which the god first offered, threw his axe also into the water, hoping for like good fortune. Mercury--here seen standing in the stream--showed him a golden axe. He claimed it, and the god having rebuked him for his impudence, left him to lose his axe and repent of his folly. The painting of the picture is conspicuous for that want of sense for colour, noted above as fatally characteristic of Salvator:--