Delacroix died, the last painter (visible above the man) who understood Art as Titian understood it, and painted with such eyes as Veronese's, passed away, leaving no pupil or successor. It is as when the last scion of a kingly race dies in some alien land. Greater artists than he we may have in scores; but he was of the Venetians, and, with his _nearly_ rival, Turner, lived to testify that it was not from a degeneracy of the kind that we have no more Tintorets and Veroneses; for both these, if they had lived in the days of those, had been their peers. Painting, as the Venetians understood it, is a lost art, because the mental conditions which made it possible exist no longer. The race is getting to that mannish stature in which every childlike quality is a shame to it; and the Venetian feeling for and cultivation of color are essentially childlike traits. No shadows of optics, no spectra of the prism clouded their passionate enjoyment of color as it was or as it might be, no uplifted finger of cold decorum frightened them into gray or sable gloom; they garbed themselves in rainbows, and painted with the sunset. Color was to them a rapture and one of the great pursuits of their lives; it was music visible, and they cultivated it as such,--not by rule and measure, by scales and opposites, through theories and canons, with petrific chill of intellect or entangling subtilty of analysis. Their lives developed their instincts, and their instincts their art. They loved color more than everything else; and therefore color made herself known to them in her rarest and noblest beauty. They went to Nature as children, and Nature met them as a loving mother meets her child, with her happiest smile and the richest of her gifts. I do not believe that to any Venetian painter the thought of whether a given tint was true ever came; if only his fine instinct told him it was lovely, he asked no question further,--and if he took a tint from Nature, it was because it was lovely, and not because he found it in Nature. _Our_ painter must see,--_their_ painter could feel; and in this antithesis is told the whole difference between the times, so far as color is concerned.