order to extract from them tales or ideas of human interest. It was not thus that Veronese painted dogs or Franz Snyders his lions and boars--not thus that the Greeks have put the horse into art. Nor, to take the best contemporary comparison, is it thus that Barye's bronzes are designed. Landscape brings us inevitably to Turner. The most highly gifted of all English artists, past or present, his genius was hardly a logical outcome of the contemporary spirit of his nation. We have no right to say this of an artist, no right to call him anomalous, while we are still in doubt as to whether he may be only the advance-guard of a new national art, the herald of a new avatar. But when he with his generation dies, when another generation develops and bears fruit, and a third is beginning to blossom, and he still seems anomalous, it is fair to hold him exceptional in his country's art, rather than characteristic thereof. Together with wonderful endowments of eye and hand, and a prodigious power of work, Turner's earlier works show us an unconscious development and a healthy oblivion of his own personality. But later the fatal modern fever entered his blood, ending in something very like delirium. From a painter he became a theorist, contaminated by a rush of criticism alike indiscriminate in praise and injudicious in blame. We shall see the baleful effects of modern methods if we look, in the wonderful series at the National Gallery, first at the pictures painted when Turner was an artist thinking of painting, then to those done when he was a self-conscious experimentalist thinking of Turner--Turner worshipped by Ruskin, Turner sick with envy of the Dutchmen and defiance of Claude. I have but a line to give to the one or two other men of abnormally splendid gifts whom this century has seen. Henri Regnault's extraordinary talent was extinguished almost at the first spark, and it is beyond prophecy to tell what it might have produced. His eccentricities seem to have been quite genuine, due to an overflow of power rather than to posing or grimace. His love of his art, his passion for color, were almost frantic in their intensity, but sincere. A certain exaggerated phrase of his is but the protest of reaction against the literary painting, the erudite and philosophical art, of his time. "La vie," he cries, "etant courte, il faut peindre tant qu'on a des yeux. Donc on ne doit pas les fatiguer a lire des stupides journaux." A crude way of putting the idea that to be an artist one needs but art.