Beside this allegory, Puvis opens five windows on his world of dreams. Naked shepherds observe, in a southern night, the course of the stars, and are themselves observed by a young woman who is creeping out of a lowly leafy hut. A man in a sort of Roman dress looks thoughtfully at some bee-hives, whilst peasants in the distance are busy working in the fields. A greybeard is sitting by the sea, from which a steep cliff emerges. On its summit a man is chained almost in the attitude of the Crucified. The shadow of an approaching vulture falls on him. Maidens emerging from the sea hover round him with disconsolate gestures. We must necessarily recognise Prometheus and the Oceanides in the scene. Another old man, who is blind, receives laurel branches from two young beauties. A haughty dame stretches her arm with magic gestures over a mysterious abyss that has engulfed mighty marble buildings, pillars, and woodwork. Behind the woman stands a youth with a torch and book in his hand. I have described in brief what one actually sees. Puvis means the star-gazers for Chaldæan shepherds; the Roman for Vergil; the greybeard in front of the Prometheus-rocks for Æschylus; the blind man for Homer receiving the laurels from the hands of the Iliad and Odyssey personified; the enchantress for history conjuring up the past. We are to read still more into it. The Chaldæans signify astronomy; Vergil bucolic poetry, Æschylus dramatic, Homer epic; the conjurer up of the dead and ruined, Clio. Thus we have before us five polished planes of the prism of man’s spiritual activity, five domains of the Muses—a fitting decoration for a library. These abstractions are painted in an abstract style. The human beings are schematic drawings as if taken from statues for illustrating an academic canon. They live psychically only through their artificial gestures—not through their mask—visages without mien of glance. The landscapes are geometrical combinations of rocks which a Cyclopean stone-mason has hewn in ancient style; of mountains whose ridge stretches in architectural lines; of evenly-coloured masses of deep-blue sea, pale-green sky, and sap-green grass country. The land is called Utopia, and is inhabited by Outis: in English, Nowhere and Nobody. The indigo, emerald, and turquoise tone is pleasant to the eye, especially as Puvis has here, contrary to his murderous habit, not massacred the living colours. But nothing except the harmony of colours appeals to me in these pictures. It is not painting: it is writing. It does not presuppose in me any feeling for art, but only a decent, classical education. It taps on my school satchel. Before these five Puvis de Chavannes pictures, I think of a highly-educated Japanese, learned in all the wisdom of his country, with the most delicate feelings for line and harmony of colours; an appreciator of Hokusai and the other great masters of Japan: he will receive no impression at all from Puvis’s works; he will look upon the