of battle, all are there, imprisoned mysteriously in the artistic grouping of a few blue-coated soldiers. But Verestchagin, who aspires to teach us the wickedness of war, is powerless to thrill us in this manner. He is probably sincere in his opinions, and he has striven hard to give them form and expression, but, lacking the artistic impulse, he has for the most part striven in vain. His huge canvases, packed with dead and dying, are less impressive, less solemn, less painful even, from their monotonous overcrowding, than a single Zouave, whose wounds De Neuville has no need to emphasize with vast expenditure of vermilion, when the faintness of a mortal agony draws his weary body to the earth. “All real power,” says Ruskin, “lies in delicacy.” To trouble the senses is an easy task, but it is through the imagination only that we receive any strong and lasting impressions, and no sincerity of purpose can suffice to turn a crude didacticism into art. It is hard to analyze the peculiar nature of the claims asserted and upheld by the disciples of modern realism. They are not content with the splendid position which is theirs by right,--not content with the admirable work they have done, and the hold they have secured on the sympathies of our earnest, rationalistic, and unimaginative age; but they assume in some subtle and incomprehensible way that their school is based upon man’s love and appreciation for his fellow-creatures. If we would but look upon all men as our brothers, it is plainly hinted, all men would be of equal interest to us, and it is our duty, as nineteenth-century citizens, to accept and cherish this universal relationship. To the perpetual sounding of the humanitarian note, there are some, it is true, who answer, with Vernon Lee’s very amusing and very wicked skeptic, that “the new-fangled bore called mankind is as great a plague as the old-fashioned nuisance called a soul;” but there are others who, finding themselves in full possession of a conscience, stoutly maintain that they love their undistinguished brother none the less because they weary of his society in literature and art. It was Ruskin, for example, who sneered at George Eliot’s characters as the “sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus,”--a terrible misapplication of an inspired phrase; but Ruskin is the last man in Christendom who can be accused of an indifference to his fellow-men. His whole life is a sufficient refutation of the charge. Voltaire is responsible for the statement that the world is full of people who are not worth knowing. Yet Voltaire was forever restlessly espousing some popular cause, forever interesting himself in the supposed welfare of these eminently undesirable associates. What he thought, and what he was quite right in thinking, is that we gain nothing, intellectually or spiritually, from the mass of men and women with whom we come in contact; and that it is wiser to fix our attention upon graceful and exalted types than to go