For the peculiar qualities of his strength are quietness and depth. One may find it in “The Jongleur,” where coming from the castle gate, flanked on each side by a sheltering range of roof, cheerless outside, but suggesting cheer within, across the waste of snow the man in motley’s solitary figure is seen, wincing as he faces the cold and touching a strain on his mandolin to keep up his spirits. It is a beautiful picture, full of significant suggestion, not only of the immediate incident, but of the pathos of the life which lives to amuse others and of the emptiness of the world for one whose spirit is apart from it. It is a picture that compares in spontaneousness of expression with the earlier drawings, and has the fuller import of a maturer mind. Surely it is along lines such as this of purer imagination that Abbey will find his truest self. To his decorations at the Boston Public Library much of what one has said of the Shakespeare paintings is applicable. They are not dramatic; their impressiveness is of a quiet and tempered sort. As one becomes familiar with these pictures, their power to make one feel the reasonableness and the beauty of the old thought; to feel it, too, not as something entirely strange, but as of present interest, grows and grows upon one. The intellect that has conceived them is not of the kind that leaps to an inspired result. Its quality is choiceness and delicacy of imaginativeness that wins us by persuasion. In these pictures, as generally in his others, it is the women that he introduces who are the most captivating features of the conception. How beautiful they are! The alluring purity of expression, for example, in the faces of the Virtues is irresistible. Their heads, fragrantly pure, sway like a row of lilies in a gentle wind. Their motionless bodies are arrayed in costumes of delicate richness, each one of which is differently exquisite; the expression is mostly signified by movement of the hands and head; along the line there is a simultaneous act of unveiling, diversified by separate traits of modesty. Perhaps the most captivating of all the figures is that of the one who holds the young knight’s left hand. She draws back and yields at the same moment, with a gesture in which there is a most subtle mingling of confidence and hesitation. The touch of man is so new to her, yet who may doubt this youth?