And how far, in his special direction, Puvis lags behind his obsolete predecessors! A Cornelius, Kaulbach, and Stilke, displayed, after all, in the invention of their symbols, a rich power of imagination which might have been worthy of better things. Their two-legged abstractions were so honestly drawn that they deceived with regard to their phantom-like nature, and could give themselves out to be real creatures of flesh and blood. Puvis’s invention, on the other hand, is so poor that it whines pitifully for alms. The representations which kindle his imagination seem derived solely from an illustrated handbook of mythology for girls’ schools. For an example of this, one has only to look at the wall-paintings for the Boston Library, which are among the most important work that Puvis has done, at least so far as their range and claims are concerned. The first represents the inspiring Muses “greeting with acclamations light carrying the Genius.” From a schematic landscape with sickly pale meadows, a sea of ultramarine blue, and spanned by a sky the colour of autumn foliage, nine female figures are flying to meet a delightfully insignificant naked youth striding on clouds of wadding. This youth holds in each hand a powerfully brilliant electrical lamp, evidently the Teslasch alternating current light, as wires are nowhere visible. The least fault of this picture is that the Muses are not aspiring in voluntary, independent flight, but hang motionless in the air in a passive attitude, like Giotto’s angels and saints, who have not yet learnt to fly. Its mortal sin is that it wishes to represent in painting a vulgar, rhetorical arrangement composed of a number of abstractions.