Mr. Richmond’s ‘Sleep and Death,’ as well as Mr. Watts’s ‘Time, Death, and Judgment,’ both ideal rather than historical or domestic pictures, were greatly enjoyed, and this by a class of people whose external lives are drearily barren of ideals. An interpretation offered by any one who had studied the parable pictures was eagerly accepted, and further thoughts suggested. ‘You can’t see Judgment’s face for his arm,’ perhaps had, perhaps had not, more meaning in it than the speaker meant; while in reference to the woman’s listless dropping of her flowers from her lap in ‘Time, Death, and Judgment,’ the remark, ‘Death does not want the flowers now she’s got ’em,’ told of thoughtful suffering at the apparent wastefulness of death. ‘Time is young yet, then,’ made one feel that the speaker had caught a glimpse of life’s possibilities with which probably any number of homilies had failed to impress him. ‘Sleep and Death,’ depicting the strong, pale warrior borne on the shoulders of Sleep, while being gently lifted into the arms of Death--so simple in colour, pure in idea, rich in suggestion--was good for the poor to see, among whom Death is robbed of none of its terrors by the coarse familiarity with which it is treated. With them funerals are too often a time of great rowdiness, and ‘a beautiful corpse’ a fit spectacle for all the neighbours--even the youngest child--to be invited to see. Death treated as a tender mother-woman, hidden in the cold grey vastness surrounding her, was a bright idea, producing, perhaps, greater modesty about the great mystery. ‘That’s the best of the whole lot, to my mind,’ came, after a long gaze, from a pale, trouble-stricken man, whose sorrows Sleep had not always helped to bear, whose loveless life had made Death’s enfolding arms seem wondrous kind. Sometimes there were discussions as to which was Sleep and which Death, ended once summarily by the loudly expressed opinion, ‘It don’t much matter which. I don’t call it proper, _anyhow_, to see a man pickaback of an angel!’--a hypercritical sense of propriety which was hardly to be expected from the appearance of the critic. Munkacsy’s picture of the ‘Lint Pickers,’ lent by Mr. J. S. Forbes, aroused much interest. In the catalogue, after a short account of the artist’s life and works, it was described thus: ‘A soldier, with a bandaged leg, is telling the story of the war to the women and children who are picking lint to dress wounds. The different feelings with which the news is received are shown with wonderful skill in the different faces. Some are waiting to hear the worst; another has already heard it, and can only bury her face in her hands. To others it is but an interesting story; while the little child is only intent on his basket of lint. Man’s inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn.’