ground; their outstretched arms enfold, as in a living cradle, the robust and laughing boy. On one side shoots a heavy sheaf of barley; on the other stands an altar, smoking with bloodless offerings to heaven; above, the strong vine hangs its clusters and its wealth of lusty leaves. More elaborate, but scarcely more beautiful--like a double rose beside a wilding blossom from the hedge of June--is the seventeenth plate, which sets forth the felicity of god-fearing folk who honor justice. These, too, are seated on the ground, young men and girls, with comely children, pledges of their joy. One child is suckled at her mother's breast; another lies folded in his father's arms; a girl and boy are kissing on their parents' knees; while a beardless youth pipes ditties on the double reed. Above the group vine-branches flourish, and the veiled Hours, givers of all goodly things, weave choric dance with song, scattering from their immortal fingers flowers upon the men beneath. In order to comprehend the purity of Flaxman's inspiration, the deep and inborn sympathy that made him in this nineteenth century a Greek, we ought to compare these illustrations with the picture of the Golden Age by Ingres. For perfection of scientific drawing from the nude, this masterpiece of the great French painter has never been excelled. It is a treasure-house of varied attitude and rhythmically studied line. Yet the whole resembles a theatrical _tableau vivant_, which an enlightened choreograph, in combination with an enterprising manager, might design to represent the Garden of Eden on a grand scale. The power displayed by Flaxman is of a very different order. There is no effort, no _mise en scène_, no parade of science, no suggestion of voluptuousness. His outlines are as simple and as pure as Hesiod's verse. We feel that, whereas Ingres is using the old vision as a schema for the exhibition of his skill, Flaxman has felt its poetry and given form to its imagination. This is not the occasion to linger over these illustrations; yet, before closing the volume that contains them, I cannot forbear from turning a page, and pointing to the pictures of the Pleiads. Seven beautiful interwoven female shapes are rising, in the one plate, like a wreath of light or vapor moulded into human form, above the reapers; in the other are descending, with equal grace of now inverted movement, over the ploughman at his toil. By no other artist's hand have the constellations elsewhere been converted, with so much feeling for their form, into the melodies of rhythmically moving human shapes. Flaxman's outlines of the Pleiads might be described as a new celestial imagery, a hitherto unapprehended astronomical mythology.