of modern frescoes--was finished for South Kensington, where was already its companion, ‘The Industrial Arts of Peace,’ completed in 1873; another mural painting, that of ‘The Wise and Foolish Virgins,’ having, at an earlier date, been placed in the chancel of a fortunate parish church in Hampshire. The year of the completion of ‘The Arts of War’ was that of Lord Leighton’s election to the Presidency of the Academy, which he obtained, it will be remembered, in direct succession to Sir Francis Grant, with whose courtly qualities, and with whose large and manly sympathies, he combined a width of artistic outlook, a refinement of artistic expression, which had scarcely perhaps belonged to any President of the Academy since the days of its first leader, Sir Joshua Reynolds. President, and knighted in consequence of that distinction in 1878, Leighton was given a baronetcy in 1886. In the interval he had not only proved beyond dispute his fitness for the responsibilities of the official position, which he filled, but--to mention only some of the most memorable of many works--had completed his own portrait for the Uffizi, had wrought the really grave and impressive canvas of Elisha raising the son of the Shunamite widow, and had, in his peculiar fashion, effected an alliance between luxury in colour and sculpturesque arrangement of ‘line’ in the great ‘Cymon and Iphigenia.’ In actual Sculpture, too--sharing the ambition of the men of the Renaissance for a triumph in various mediums--he had produced ‘The Sluggard.’ It was extraordinarily clever, but perhaps its qualities were less truly sculptural than was some of his design executed in the older and more familiar material. Yet, if this particular work did not possess to the full all the great qualities that might have been expected in it, the order of Lord Leighton’s talent was one, nevertheless, which empowered him to succeed thoroughly in Sculpture, sooner or later; for, in Sculpture, while there was room for the generally unimpeded play of his own skill in design, there might have been a relief found from the exercise of his art in a path in which success to him was more uncertain and capricious--the path of colour.