illustrated by a Bacchanalian Vintage Festival, a Harvest scene, and Arcadian figures. "Industry" by allegorical scenes of Commerce, Navigation, and Silk-growing; and "War" by the Manufacture of Arms, and a group of fettered women being taken into captivity. The heroic figures in grisaille on the pilasters are personifications of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the six principal rivers of France, namely the Garonne, the Saone, the Loire, the Rhine (which then belonged to France as much as to Germany), the Seine, and the Rhone. Before Delacroix had completed the paintings in the Salon du Roi, that is to say in 1837, he was entrusted with the even more important commission for the decoration of the Libraries of the Chamber of Deputies at the Palais Bourbon, and of the Senate at the Luxembourg; three years earlier, in 1834, he had experimented in the technique of fresco painting, which he found more congenial than distemper, when executing three overdoor panels of Leda, Anacreon, and Bacchus, at Valmont, where they still remain _in situ_ in all their pristine freshness. The Library of the Palais Bourbon has been described by a well-known recent German critic as the "French Sistine Chapel." To any one examining this vast work in an unprejudiced spirit it will be difficult to share this enthusiasm. The cool and noble intellectuality which is at the basis of Delacroix's art, even where it is apparently most spontaneous and fugous, certainly renders these decorations supremely interesting. But the appeal is intellectual rather than sensuous. The beholder is filled with profound respect, instead of being thrilled by the emotional effect of colour. Nor can this be entirely due to bad lighting and to the serious deterioration and indifferent restoring of the paintings, of which scarcely more than the design is by Delacroix's own hand, the execution being almost entirely due to Lassalle Bordes and other assistants, who are also largely responsible for the actual painting of the Luxembourg decoration.