into health their limbs, aching from constrained positions. There is profound instruction in the fact that to Giotto, in his effort completely to burst the fetters of Byzantinism, which his master, Cimabue, had already strongly shaken, it first occurred to introduce into his work the elements of landscape. His picture in the Louvre of St Francis of Assisi is a touchingly _naïve_ example of this. It was Corot who first uttered in the French painting of the nineteenth century the creative words, “Let there be light.” Of course, he did not discover day, for there were masters before him in whose pictures the sun shone. We find in Ruysdael the keen, chilly clearness of a northern sky. Claude Lorrain gives warm, tender evening tones of the south, which have the effect of luxurious warm baths. From him, Turner directly traces his descent, who overheats Claude’s pleasant tepidity to a glow, and raises his gentle clearness to a blinding splendour of radiancy. But no one before Corot has understood, like him, how to fill pictures with such discreet yet penetrating, delicate yet glowing light. It is no melodramatic, no Bengal or concocted light, no light of strange, exceptional occasions, of confusing colours, no vulgar, pompous, excessively brilliant light, but a restfully even, inexhaustibly rich, cheerful light that fills the soul with joy and hope. Corot’s light sheds its rays from a hopeful soul. It is luminous optimism in visible form. Some years ago, a Corot Exhibition took place in the Galliera Museum, and those who arranged it contrived to collect about the whole of the master’s life-work. I looked attentively at one point: it contained hardly a single evening, not a single autumn note or muttering of a storm, but only morning and spring and blue sky. That is characteristic of this child of the sun. In Corot the elements of beauty are nearly always the same: pleasant hill-countries, winding paths that lead to weird distances and invite our yearning to fare thither; at a curve of the road gleaming water mirroring silver cloudlets; in the foreground delicately-leaved trees; around and over everything the wondrous air thrilling with light, animated with a thin haze of mist, in which, bewitched by the feeling of spring, by an association of ideas, we fancy we can hear the soft bell-notes of invisible church towers, the twitter of pairing birds engaged in building their nests, and the buzz of early beetles. Some of the Corots in the Thiéry rooms, _e.g._, the view of the Coliseum, are youthful productions, and do not yet show the dreamily soft, as it were, inspired style and silver glow of his maturity. They are still somewhat dry and hard, yet, even in these more prosaic pictures, the heart-quickening light falls from heaven—Corot’s incomparable strength.