One year, I remember, Hébert had devoted all his time to one great allegorical canvas, the Shunamite of the Canticle seeking news of her Beloved from the maidens by the gate. The faint eastern dawn was paling the sky and bringing out mistily a few features of the city in the background, as a train of girls who had been to fetch water were returning from the well. They were human girls, and had been chattering gaily as they approached the gate; then the words died on their lips, the foremost ones fell back, crowding those behind, for they were met by the Shunamite, a maid in all the white beauty of first youth, undraped, naked as truth, and pure as Eve on the morning of her creation, her eyes shining with love through brimming tears, and her hands stretched out entreatingly as she asked, “Have ye seen my Beloved, ye daughters of Jerusalem?” It was a strange picture; the thought was the same that Titian expressed in his “Divine and Earthly Love,” which is, to me, the most beautiful of his paintings. Hébert had got away from his own gorgeous traditions altogether and had painted with true inspiration. The girl’s body was like a slender reed of flame, just hovering on earth before rising to Heaven. There was every year an exhibition, at the French Academy, of the work of the students, who, having won the “Prix de Rome” in Paris, were privileged to study in Rome for three years at the expense of the French Government. Unfortunately for the attractiveness of the exhibition, it was incumbent on the students to introduce one or more nude figures into their paintings to show what progress they were making in anatomical drawing. The more zealous ones would sometimes cover a fifteen-foot canvas with a crowd of nude warriors in every stress of effort that the most violent conflict could call forth, the copious bloodshed depicted demonstrating, to a thoughtful mind, the young painter’s feelings towards the strict and exigent judges who were to pronounce upon his merits. I remember a “Rape of the Sabines,” where some rather dandified Roman robbers were taking no end of trouble to possess themselves of a mob of huge, beefy viragos who were kicking and struggling with all their might—creatures whom no practical man would attempt for a moment to bring into his home.