I am somewhat poor again in those etchings which are the creation of the austere genius of Legros. Popular they will never be, for Legros is almost alone among men of genius in not belonging to his own day--in receiving well-nigh no influence from the actual hour. He is a belated Old Master--but a ‘master’ always: never an affected copyist, who pranks ‘in faded antique dress.’ Had he but humoured the affectations of the time, it is quite possible that the time would at all events have talked about him, and, denied actual popularity, he might yet have been solaced by an æsthetic coterie’s hysterical admiration. But that has not been for Legros. As it is, with his gravely whispered message, his general reticence, his overmastering sense of Style, his indifference to attractive truths of detail, his scorn of the merely clever, he is placed at a disadvantage. But his work remains; not only the etchings, of which Messieurs Thibaudeau and Poulet-Malassis catalogued a hundred and sixty-eight as long ago as 1877, but the grave pictures in which the peasant of the Boulognais devoutly worships, or in which the painted landscape is as the landscape of a dream, and the vigorous oil portraits--not one of which, perhaps, reaches the nobility of his etched portrait of Watts--and the pencil drawings of the nude, several of which Legros has given to the Museum of his birthplace, Dijon, where the stray Englishman who stays to look at them finds that they are as finely severe as are the pencil drawings of Ingres. I have his one big etching, ‘La Mort du Vagabond’--the scale too large to be effective generally, but, _pace_ Mr. Whistler, I do not, in this case, find it ‘an offence,’[4]--and amongst others, two that have, it may be, no particular rarity, but that are worthily, and I think even exceptionally, characteristic. The one is ‘La Communion dans l’Eglise Saint-Médard’: in line and in feeling an instance of the most dignified treatment of ecclesiastical function or religious office. And the other is ‘Les Chantres Espagnols,’ the singing-men, aged and decayed, eight of them, in a darkened choir--was ever a vision of narrow and of saddened lives more serious or more penetrating! [4] ‘The huge plate,’ writes Mr. Whistler--on the whole truthfully--‘the huge plate is an offence: its undertaking an unbecoming display of determination and ignorance, its accomplishment a triumph of unthinking earnestness and uncontrolled energy.’