Meunier rises to the height of the Vedic hymns when he turns towards the countryman and his heroic deeds in nourishing mankind. In the relief, “The Harvest,” a band of reapers—four men and two women—are grappling with the ripe corn. One seizes violently the stalks, the second, bending forward, makes a wide stroke with his sickle, a woman binds into sheaves the ears that have been mown. In the background, one longing for rest looks at the position of the sun, and another, _rapido fessus aestu_ (fatigued by the scorching summer heat), to use Vergil’s words, wipes the sweat from his brow. There is the note of the Eclogues about this work. Over it floats the consecration of the lofty act with which the rooted son of the soil, the ploughman—the creator and bearer of all civilisation—gains the bread of mankind out of the earth. A single figure, “June,” is also created from this emotion. It is the realisation in free sculpture of a _motif_ from the relief. A reaper, stripped to the waist, emaciated by the heavy toil of harvesting, exhausted by his day’s work, leans upon his scythe and glances, shading his eyes with his hand, at the sun—“I would it were bedtime and all was over.” One would like to press the hand of this brave, good fellow, or at any rate that of the artist who has represented him to us so faithfully and straightforwardly. All Meunier’s works have not this delicacy; many are weak, some absolute failures. As an instance of such I point to “The Puddlers,” though it has been particularly admired by some critics. Three iron-founders stand at the open stoke-hole of the puddle-furnace, and feed it with mighty pieces for melting. From the opening issue steam and smoke, which curl round the three men wielding rakes and tongs, and eddy upwards. Meunier has tried to represent this steam in sculpture. He has given it a concrete form, necessarily the same corporeality as the bodies, tools, blocks of metal, the flaming furnace; for sculpture possesses no means of differentiating the thickness of matter, when it abandons the mere engraved line or the make-shift of various perforations. The result is, that instead of smoke there is an amazing image which partly reminds us of an untrimmed dab of plaster, partly of a weather-beaten stalactite. Meunier was originally a painter, and took to sculpture only late in life. His “Puddlers” are formed with the technique of a painter, from which the artist did not immediately emancipate himself. Another relief, “The Bricklayers,” is absolutely a mistake. Two men are standing in the loam-pit and handing up the bricks to their mates above. They do this with theatrical gestures, as if a conquered king were handing over his crown to his conqueror. The contrast between the bombastic movement and its vulgar purpose is so grotesque that the picture has an irresistibly comic effect. Here Meunier is, for the only occasion in all the works of his with which I am acquainted, insincere and affected.