In Meunier’s work there is a unity from which he seldom digresses. He lived in a Belgian district of coal-pits and smelting furnaces, in the very midst of rough labourers who passed their lives in the galleries of mines, or in the fiery glow of furnace mouths. He found his models among these figures. There the Labour movement in Belgium arose—one of the most rapid in Europe; there Meunier’s art grew up—one of the most intensive at the present time. The miner and the iron-smelter are his heroes; he admires their strength, and from the bottom of his heart he bewails their pains. And if he is unfaithful to his Cyclopses, it is only, touched and enraptured, to look after his other darlings—the country folk working in the fields, a subject which instils in him as much reverence as the burrowing of the coal-miners underground, and the powerful hammer-strokes of the iron-smiths. One of his greatest creations, perhaps his greatest is a bronze a span high, representing an old woman, the wife or, as I would rather assume from the stormy intensity of her emotion, the mother of a miner, who, after a driving storm, has gone to the mouth of the shaft of a coal-pit, to which the corpse of some one belonging to her has been brought. The woman stands there, leaning slightly forward, her countenance petrified with dumb despair, her arms limp, her one hand lying in the other, yet without any convulsion, and powerless, her knees through a very slight bend betraying her trembling, her feet instinctively somewhat turned inwards, so as to give a broader support to the body, and to protect the almost crippled figure from falling down. The whole is such a frightfully expressive picture of a poor human creature who has, as it were, received a blow on the head, and in her crushed condition is not strong enough even for sobbing and wringing her hands, that it strikes the spectator with a cold shudder. Observe, the old woman wears the garments of the poor Walloons, heavy, stiff gowns and neckerchiefs, the hard angles and folds of which can express only very roughly and indistinctly the soft play of the weakly-quivering muscles. What penetrating keenness of observation does it need to recognise in an entirely self-contained form shrouded in uncouth, shapeless clothes, without gestures or play of features, and to imitate, without the slightest exaggeration, yet overpoweringly, the tenderest lines which, even in such unfavourable conditions of material, express clearly and dramatically all that is passing in this almost impenetrably veiled human soul. This little figure, no larger than the decoration of a clock, is a great monument, and, like every real work of art, it points far beyond the limits of itself. It reveals much more to the power of imagination than it manifests to the eye. This is actually proved in this very case; for Meunier has a group which supplements the work described: the same old woman, and before her, lying outstretched on