In the arts some attempt has been made to give this quality of supreme restfulness. The early Egyptians in their colossal Pharaonic statues attained a formal repose by the bulk and weight and hardness of the granite and the calm attitude of the figure seated in its great stone chair. The Parthenon as a building and the Phidian sculptures of the pediment, now in the British Museum, again have a poise and style not inaptly called restful. Once more in painting serenity has often been attributed to the landscapes of Claude and Corot and not without good reason. Martin liked that feature in both these landscape-painters. Standing before the paralleled and contrasted Claude and Turner in the National Gallery, he called George Chalmers’s attention to the serene dignity of the Claude and the fussiness and labored work of the Turner. But before ever he saw Turner or Claude or Corot, he was picturing this attribute of nature with marked effect. His critics and admirers called attention to the absence of anything dramatic in his art; they noticed that his landscapes were deserted of man, that they were silent, forsaken places with a solemn stillness about them. Nothing stirred in them; God and Martin only had seen them. But was not all this merely another way of describing nature’s eternal repose which Martin had grasped and pictured? There is no stillness like that of a deserted church or a haunted house, and are not all Martin’s churches deserted and all his houses haunted? There is no hush like that of a mountain forest, and are not all his forests motionless? There is no rest like that of a mountain lake caught in a cup in the hills, and are not all Martin’s lakes still waters that throw back the reflection of serene skies? We speak of his poetry, of his sentiment and his feeling about nature, and these he had in abundance, but do we always credit him with a knowledge of nature’s profundities? Had he not an intellectual grasp of the great elemental truths of nature, and was his art not largely a calm, supreme, and splendid exposition of those truths to mankind? A seer and a poet he was; but also a thinker. His long fallow periods when he did not, could not, paint were periods of intellectual reflection that brought forth after their kind an art which was at least unique. Martin’s pictures never were very popular. During his life the great public passed them by and the picture-collector bought them only with caution and at very modest prices. It was to be supposed that after bravely living and dying in poverty his pictures would finally come into the market and sell at factitious prices. Such indeed has been the case. Some of them shortly after his death fetched over five thousand dollars apiece, and to meet an increased demand for them the genial forger came to the rescue. Spurious Martins were made and sold to picture-collectors until finally the scandal of it had an airing in open court.