Géricault stands an examination of his title to fame badly. He has not so correct an eye for the figures of horses as was believed before instantaneous photographs. His portraits of soldiers are really more crude than powerful. Even the sketch for the “Raft of the Medusa,” reveals evidence of straining after effect which our pious admiration refused to notice in the colossal work in the Louvre. On the other hand, the figure of Louis Leopold Boilly gained strangely in the Century Exhibition. Up till then I knew only his “Arrival of a Diligence at a Posting-house,” in the Louvre, and I did not rate him very highly on account of the affected _atelier_ light of this otherwise prettily studied little picture. Here he disclosed himself as a great philosopher and satirist. One picture represents a popular merry-making with wine _gratis_, another a free performance at the Ambigu-Comique Theatre. There the crowd is fighting murderously over a drink that can be had for nothing; half-grown hobbledehoys throttle bestial greybeards; bullies claw hold of furies; dreadful feet trample on faces and necks in the mad storming of the wine supplies, and the victors in this struggle have their reward: they lie on the ground bestially drunk. The scenes at the entrance of the theatre are not quite so vulgar. There is a less dogged scramble for intellectual enjoyment than for that of the palate. Yet here, too, the most brutal lack of consideration and greedy selfishness triumph; here, too, the strong man overmasters the weak; here, too, among beings who seem to belie their human form, the law of the jungle holds good; and here, too, poor people pay for a little doubtful pleasure with the sufferings, dangers, and exertions of a storming of the Malakoff. In the foreground of both pictures stands a group of well-dressed persons who, half in pity, half in disgust, look at the disorderly pushing of the rabble from a respectful distance. These rich people have the _rôle_ of teaching the moral of the fable. They express the sociological thought of the painter. Boilly deplores the low moral condition of the masses, and reproaches the dominant class with having degraded them to beasts, when it pretends to give them a feast. He rejects with utter disdain the dogma of equality, yet without haughtiness, for he has for the disinherited the somewhat condescending, yet warm pity of a genuine patrician. These are extremely modern—I might call them Toynbee-feelings—and they are expressed with an exact, judicious brush that can conjure forth the confused turmoil of a great, raging multitude, and, nevertheless, remain faithful in all details. Boilly was decidedly a master.