A great deal of the charm of Mr. McEwen’s panels is due to the landscapes, which are instinct with poetical imagination. The artist has given them an atmosphere which sets them back in the past, when the world was in its youth and full of promise rather than fulfilment. In the episodes selected, it is not the heyday of heroic achievement that he has commemorated, but the first impulses, such as those of Jason and Paris, or the reverses and inadequate results of human effort as illustrated in the other heroes. Stripped of its glamor, this is perhaps the true story of heroism in all ages. Mr. Gutherz in his seven panels on the ceiling of the House Reading Room, has symbolized Light in its physical and metaphysical aspects. The starting-point of the scheme is the central panel--“Let there be light”--and the others follow in prismatic sequence. He has not painted the clearness of light, but its subtle play upon various surfaces. For example, from the central figure, “whose face no man hath seen and lived,” radiates a pale saffron glow, struggling through the formless void of primeval chaos, and piercing it with stars and splinters of light. In the next panel of _Progress_ light is burnishing the dry atmosphere of an eastern sky; while in that of _Research_ it acts and re-acts upon the particles of deep water, and spends itself in a soft suffused luminousness. Mr. Dielman has adopted in his _History_ an almost sculptural design; in _Law_ rather a pictorial. In the latter the group on the spectator’s right is an especially attractive portion of the composition. In the case of the centre figure, it is well worthy of notice how the flexible lines on one side woo the figures, while on the other the drapery as well as the figure of Fraud slinks away from the hard line of the sword and the strong angle of the arm.