Gustave Moreau stands apart from the mighty procession of French art in the nineteenth century, which was headed by the classic cohort, continued by the powerful band of the knights and squires of romanticism, and then unrolled itself before our eyes, in the legion of the bourgeois National Guard of Philistine academic routine-art, in the blouse-wearing troop of Realists, and, lastly, in the vacillating and oscillating sun-flower groups of Symbolism. He is not to be classed in this line of development. He went his way alone, deaf to the strains of the world of which he heard only those with which he himself was in harmony from the beginning. He had some few kindred spirits among contemporary painters, but he did not know them, and they did not know him either, and they exercised no influence on each other, but grew up independently of one another from the same conditions of like temperaments and peculiar moods that in the middle decades of the nineteenth century dominated narrow, exclusive circles, without being characteristic of this or any other time. For these temperaments are purely subjective, and accord with the external only so far as civilisation, when it has reached a certain grade of intensity and artificiality, always produces men with widely preponderating development of fancy, who are continually looking into their inner selves, and cannot withdraw their eyes from the fascinating spectacle of the wonderful events being enacted therein. Moreau was just such a visionary. Remote from life, remote from actuality, he ever remained engrossed in his dream, and his noble art served him to retain his apparently multifarious, but, in reality, little changing dream-pictures. His museum is, then, a world by itself, with which the objective outer world has no more in common than have dreams and ravings with pictures of the actual which serve them as a stimulus, and furnish them with the elements of their subjective combinations.