And he died as he had lived. A few days before his death it is recorded "that he told one of his friends how in a dream he had seen 'a landscape with a sky all roses, and clouds all roses too. It was delicious,' he said; 'I can remember it quite well. It will be an admirable thing to paint.' The morning of the day he died, the 22nd of February, 1875, he said to the woman servant who brought him some nourishment, 'Le père Corot is lunching up there to-day.'" "It will be hard to replace the artist; the man can never be replaced," was one fine tribute to his memory; and another, "Death might have had pity and paused before cutting short so sweet a life-work." A sale of some 600 of Corot's works took place in the May and June following his death. It realised nearly two million francs, or £80,000. This is, of course, not a fraction of the sum that would be realised were the same pictures to be put up to auction to-day; but it shows that his achievement was beginning to be estimated at something approaching its true value. Corot's work, of which at one time he was able to boast he had a "complete collection," is now scattered to the four corners of the earth. Paris possesses some splendid examples at the Louvre, and there are many not less admirable distributed among the provincial galleries of France. America holds a large number in public and private galleries, and there are in private ownership in this country Corots sufficient to make a magnificent collection. Lately the National Gallery has been enriched, by the Salting bequest, with seven fine paintings from the master's hand, eloquent witnesses alike to his individuality and variety. To me it is an added joy, when I stand before a Corot picture, to think of the gracious personality of its creator. It is almost as if his eager, happy voice were pointing out the manifold beauties of the miraculously bedaubed canvas, and recalling the "moment," so certainly made permanent there. It is always a "moment" that is seized in Corot's paintings, with the exception of some of the earliest. Nature is surprised with her fairest charms unveiled, in a passing emotion, of laughter or of tears. There is life, movement, the tremble of being, in everything set down. The air is palpitant with colour, rainbows are dissolved in an atmosphere that clothes everything in magic and mystery. Beneath the gay confidence of the painting, subserving the emotion of the moment, what knowledge is shown in these pictures! These tree forms, bold and delicate, with such wonderful subtleties of drawing in them, give more than externals. They reveal a very psychology of trees, the soul that the artist so plainly saw in everything around him. He was concerned to set down far more than the details of the scene before him, not in the least satisfied to be but a reporter. The higher, or, if you like, deeper verities were what he strove for, and the universal verdict to-day is that he did not strive in vain.