it is the best of all possible things that a world should be possible. Watts, as has been more than once more or less definitely suggested, is dominated throughout by this prehistoric wonder. A man to him, especially a great man, is a thing to be painted as Fra Angelico painted angels, on his knees. He has indeed, like many brilliant men in the age that produced Carlyle and Ruskin, an overwhelming tendency to hero-worship. That worship had not, of course, in the case of these men any trace of that later and more denaturalized hero-worship, the tendency to worship madmen--to dream of vast crimes as one dreams of a love-affair, and to take the malformation of the soul to be the only originality. To the Carlylean (and Watts has been to some by no means inconsiderable extent a Carlylean), to the Carlylean the hero, the great man, was a man more human than humanity itself. In worshipping him you were worshipping humanity in a sacrament: and Watts seems to express in almost every line of his brush this ardent and reverent view of the great man. He overdoes it. Tennyson, fine as he was both physically and mentally, was not quite so much of a demi-god as Watts’ splendid pictures would seem to suggest. Many other sitters have been subjected, past all recognition, to this kind of devout and ethereal caricature. But the essential of the whole matter was that the attitude of Watts was one which might almost be called worship. It was not, of course, that he always painted men as handsome in the conventional sense, or even as handsome as they were. William Morris impressed most people as a very handsome man: in Watts’ marvellous portrait, so much is made of the sanguine face, the bold stare, the almost volcanic suddenness of the emergence of the head from the dark green background, that the effect of ordinary good looks, on which many of Morris’s intimates would probably have prided themselves, is in some degree lost. Carlyle, again, when he saw the painter’s fine rendering of him, said with characteristic surliness that he “looked like a mad labourer.” Conventionally speaking, it is of course, therefore, to be admitted that the sitters did not always come off well. But the exaggeration or the distortion, if exaggeration or distortion there were, was always effected in obedience to some almost awestruck notion of the greatness or goodness of the great or good sitter. The point is not whether Watts sometimes has painted men as ugly as they were painted by the primary religious painters; the point is, as I have said, that he painted as they did, on his knees. Now no one thinks that Mr. Sargent paints the Misses Wertheimer on his knees. His grimness and decision of drawing and colouring are not due to a sacred optimism. But those of Watts are due to this: are due to an intense conviction that there is within the sitter a great reality which has to give up its secret before he leaves the seat or the model’s throne. Hence come the red violent face and