to the forces of nature. In his more successful portraits the actual physical characteristics of the sitter appear to be something of the nature of artistic creations; they are decorative and belong to a whole. We feel that he has filled in the fiery orange of Swinburne’s hair as one might fill in a gold or copper panel. We know that he was historically correct in making the hair orange, but we cannot get rid of a haunting feeling that if his scheme had been a little different he would have made it green. This indescribable sentiment is particularly strong in the case of the portrait of Rossetti. Rossetti is dressed in a dark green coat which perfectly expresses his sumptuous Pre-Raphaelite affectation. But we do not feel that Rossetti has adopted the dark green coat to suit his dark red beard. We rather feel that if anyone had seized Rossetti and forcibly buttoned him up in the dark green coat he would have grown the red beard by sheer force of will. Before we quit the subject of portraiture a word ought to be said about two exceedingly noble portraits, those of Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Manning. The former is interesting because, as an able critic said somewhere (I wish I could remember who he was or where he wrote), this is the one instance of Watts approaching tentatively a man whom he in all reasonable probability did not understand. In this particular case the picture is a hundred times better for that. The portrait-painter of Matthew Arnold obviously ought not to understand him, since he did not understand himself. And the bewilderment which the artist felt for those few hours reproduced in a perfect, almost in an immortal, picture the bewilderment which the sitter felt from the cradle to the grave. The bewilderment of Matthew Arnold was more noble and faithful than most men’s certainty, and Watts has not failed to give that nobility a place even greater perhaps than that which he would have given to it had he been working on that fixed theory of admiration in which he dealt with Tennyson or Morris. The sad sea-blue eyes of Matthew Arnold seemed to get near to the fundamental sadness of blue. It is a certain eternal bleakness in the colour which may for all I know have given rise to the legend of blue devils. There are times at any rate when the bluest heavens appear only blue with those devils. The portrait of Cardinal Manning is worth a further and special notice, because it is an illustration of the fact to which I have before alluded: the fact that while Watts in one sense always gets the best out of his sitters, he does not by any means always get the handsomest out of them. Manning was a singularly fine-looking man, even in his emaciation. A friend of mine, who was particularly artistic both by instinct and habits, gazed for a long time at a photograph of the terrible old man clad in those Cardinal’s robes and regalia in which he exercised more than a Cardinal’s power, and said reflectively, “He would have made his fortune