Knowing him in the light of his later work, we may feel it one of the anomalies of art that his master in Paris should have been Gérôme. Yet looking back over our own lives, we realize that it was the element of character, the presence or lack of it in those with whom we came in close contact, that determined their influence upon us. And this quality of character was strong in Gérôme,--of all the more value to Brush because it was of a kind in many respects so dissimilar to his own. He is something of a rebel,--I use the word in its most respectable sense--intellectually independent, prone to dissatisfaction with things as they are, unconventional, perhaps a little impractical and visionary, as rebels are apt to be,--qualities, all of them, that are facets of character. Gérôme, however, a conservative, addicted to rote and rule, with his scholarly devotion to semi-classicalism or, as some more severely style it, pseudo-classicalism; a cold precisionist, who would render the death of a Cæsar as accurately and dispassionately as a surgeon dissects a corpus--such a character would be a wholesome make-weight to a young romantic mind. It would emphasize especially the need of knowledge and mastery of facts, encouraging the formation of a stable basis on which romance, if it were minded to push its head into the clouds, might at least have sure foundation for its feet. Certainly, one accomplishment that Brush brought back from Paris was a feeling for form, and another was a faculty of seizing upon the reality of things and of keeping close to facts. No doubt it is as a painter of ideas that he is significant; but do not let us overlook the point that all his work, especially the earlier examples, shows an appreciation of the actual. How much of this he owes to the influence of Gérôme it would be hard to estimate; but even if this realization of the mental and artistic value of the actual is an element in his own character, the contact with this master must have done much to give it fibre. For the sense of actuality is communicable, while ideas are not only personal to their author, but inalienable. And how distressingly elusive, tame, and profitless in pictures are ideas unbased on actuality--the landscape, for example, that makes for sentiment without support of drawing and construction. In pictures of the human figure an inspired control of colour may fill us with enthusiasm, but cannot wholly stifle our regret if the drawing is inadequate; for the beauty of nature is the beauty of its forms and of the coloured raiment that clothes the forms without disguising them, while in the world of spiritual ideas the beauty depends upon their association with or analogy to the world of matter.