portrait-statue Boyle reveals a penetrating and sympathetic insight and a choice of treatment that are the products of an active imagination; and when in a subject like the “Stone Age” his imagination can work as it lists, it reaches to that point where the particular becomes merged in the universal suggestion. For in this group we pass from interest in the episode to a realisation of the rude grandeur of the primitive nature, the physical grandeur of untrammelled development and the natural instinct of the mother animal. I recall another group of his: a modern peasant woman with her baby folded in sleep upon her broad bosom and another child nestling at her feet. Here, too, the mother is vigorous and ample, but rounded and softened by more genial environment. Yet in the generousness of her form as in the strenuousness of the other’s, we feel the same suggestion of the earth-mother, the mother in closest affinity with nature. Only, as nature progresses from rigour to amenity, the primal instinct of preservation of her young has passed into the all-pervading tenderness of maternal solicitude. It is, in fact, the typical conception of motherhood, as compared with the merely individual representation that appears in each of these groups. The conception, moreover, is coloured with modern thought, not a spiritualised abstraction, like Raphael’s, but enriched with the passion and fecundity of earth. Raphael may have sought his models among the girl-mothers of Trastevere or the Campagna; but his idea of motherhood he brought down from the region of artistic and intellectual speculation. On the other hand, the tendency of the modern artist is to set back his model in her actual environment and to discover her affinity thereto. Or, if his model be nature, he no longer attempts to spiritualise it by arrangement of lines and forms that accord with his abstract theories of beauty, or by investing it with atmosphere and sunlight, drawn from his own imagination. Nor is he satisfied with the objective nature-study of the Dutchmen of the sixteenth century; but, observing nature no less closely than they, he peers further into it in the search for a soul and heart within her that shall correspond to the heart and soul within himself. The main current of the poetic imagination in modern art is to find the soul in the fact and it is a phase of the general tendency of modern thought. Our gaze is earthward; to the beauty, poetry and desirable goodness that are in nature and the natural life, and to the spiritual suggestion in the actual.