No. Constable of the "unpicturesque localities" does not thrill, and his pictures evoke a meditative rather than an ecstatic mood. In his large works one never finds the haunting charm of a fine Corot, the majesty of a Rousseau, or the clarity of light and colour of a Harpigny. He did not, except in rare cases, select from the abundance of Nature; he was content with facts as he saw them, and he laboured at his surfaces until sometimes one can hardly disentangle the incidents for the paint in which they are enveloped. "The Leaping Horse," in the Diploma Gallery, is a magnificent performance in picture-making but it is heavy--heavy as a mid-day English Sunday dinner. It has force, strength, knowledge, vigour, but little beauty, except perhaps in the sweep of sky; and certainly no strangeness. The signs of labour are written all over it; you feel that he has carefully and conscientiously composed this picture for an exhibition, and that in the long labour he has lost the early impulse and freshness of the _pensée mère_. To see how much he lost you have only to study the large sketch for "The Leaping Horse," in the Victoria and Albert Museum, finer, bolder, much more instinct with life and inspiration than the finished production. Which brings me to the two great divisions of Constable's life-work--the sketches, which we are told he did not regard as "serious," and the finished pictures. His sketches are innumerable, and all, or at any rate the great majority of them possess the impulse, the lyrical note, so often lacking in his larger canvases. Of course, this criticism applies to all painters. The sketch is made for love, the picture for an Exhibition. What could be more luminously spacious, unworried and unfettered by the convention of picture-making than his small oil-sketch of "Harwich: Sea and Lighthouse," in the Tate Gallery, of which there is a pencil sketch at South Kensington, dated 1815. Here is the first impression caught and transferred to canvas while the blood was still hot, the pulse quick, and the eyes eager to record this scene of desolate beauty, vast sky, rippling ocean, bare foreshore, lonely lighthouse, and one figure in the foreground, with notes of almost indistinguishable figures beyond the lighthouse, and a few remote sails upon the sea. It has not the learning of "The Hay Wain" or "The Leaping Horse," and the steady flame of Constable's fame would probably long ago have been extinguished had it depended for existence entirely upon his sketches; but, speaking for myself, it is to his sketches that I go for joy. Verily this student of Nature, who disliked autumn and loved spring; who painted summer, "its breezes, its heat, its heavy colouring," its gusts of winds, its sudden storms; verily he lives in our hearts wherever our eyes meet his sketches. They induce, they compel one to linger in such places as the dark staircase of the Diploma Gallery, in Burlington House, the walls of