French, himself of New England stock, born at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1850, came under these influences at the impressionable age of eighteen, when he began to model under the instruction of a member of the Alcott family, the head of which, Amos Bronson, had been one of the leading writers in _The Dial_. Moreover, his own nature, one may suspect, furnished congenial soil for the germination of the seeds which it received during this time, since the fruit of his maturity savours unmistakably of these conditions. And this, notwithstanding that he spent many subsequent years in Florence, where his master was Thomas Ball, a blithe, sweet nature, gentle, refined, and full of _bonhomie_. Here again was a continuance of, at least, the gracious influences which had surrounded French’s growth from the beginning, and it was in the light of these that he sucked in nourishment from the environment of Florence. To judge by the tenor of his afterwork, the treasures of the city did not affect him very directly; here and there we may find a hint of assimilated style, notably in the angels for the Clark monument in the Forest Hills Cemetery; but for the most part, apparently, the impressions of these days served to give artistic indorsement to the gracious elevation of the earlier literary ones. Even the work upon which he engaged himself at that time, a statue of “Endymion,” was a following of the Canova tradition, still lingering in Italy, rather than of the beckonings of the older art, and chiefly characteristic of himself by reason of the calm, passionless purity of the emotion involved. The degree and quality of emotion which enters into an artist’s work must constitute one of the most important elements in his art and will even affect that other essential element, the character of his technique. How his work will affect ourselves will largely depend upon the extent to which we respond, either by nature or by a habit of cultivation, to the particular kind of emotion which he portrays. On the other hand, a great number of people seem unable to appreciate the emotional quality in a work of art and look only for the intellectual, while more than a few artists display little or nothing of the latter quality and exaggerate the sensuous. Especially are they apt to limit the range of the emotions to one kind, that of love, and to regard it exclusively in its sexual manifestation. In this way the word passion, with its deep significance of an emotion so strong as to bring suffering, has been belittled. Some art is the product of this nobler kind of passion, a good deal is only a tiresome reiteration of the lower kind, and, again, there is art which emanates from a tranquillity of spirit undisturbed by either kind of passion. It is in this last category that French’s art seems to belong.