Beside these excellent details, many middling and absolute weak ones disturb us. The dead husband in the grave has an Aztec face of repulsive ugliness, which is not called for by any artistic considerations. The attitudes of many figures, especially those squatting or cowering, are in bad taste. A primary personage—the man who has stepped into the Gate of Death—stalks bending forward with head bowed down and the muscles of his back contracted, like one who is hauling with all his might. It is a matter of surprise that the tow-rope with which the vessel is dragged is not to be seen. I cannot prove it, but I am convinced that Bartholomé has formed this man, not after a model, but from what he recollected of a hauler by Constantin Meunier. I have already called attention to the monotony of the group _motifs_. The whole conception of the composition, at any rate of the upper story, is an echo of Canova’s monument to Maria Christina at Vienna, with the further development that Bartholomé shows the subterrestrial and supernatural continuation of the theme which Canova carries only as far as the entrance to the realm of shades, leaving what follows to the pious belief of the spectator. The weightiest objection which must be made to the work as a whole is its offensive lack of repose. All the individual details are, with few happy exceptions, realistic, whilst the effect of the whole composition moves in extreme unreality. How has Bartholomé’s most original artistic instinct not preserved him from trying to present a wholly ideal dogma with the most vulgar, petty realism? Simple mediæval sculptors might work thus. In our contemporaries we do not believe in simplicity, and therefore the discord between idea and form has a jarring effect. The most ideal dogma that Bartholomé preaches is, however, that of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body; for his monument can mean only that, if it means anything at all. It is conceived as a consolation to the sorrow-laden who form the last escort to a dear one that is dead, or are making a pilgrimage to the grave of one they loved. And what consolation has he to offer them? See, he says, in the figures on the upper story, the sorrow with which men approach the gates of shadow-land. Why this faint-heartedness? Why this timorous shrinking from the terrors of death? Death has no terrors. It is entering into peace and the fulfilment of a high promise. And he shows, in the lower story, the gentle, blessed rest the dead enjoy who there slumber until their resurrection, watched by their guardian angel, who awakes them at the appointed hour, and convey their immortal souls to their divine destination.