The real scope and bent of his genius were to be triumphantly manifested at this very period by his wonderful composition _The Modern Midnight Conversation_. I don’t think there is a single artistic design extant which exemplifies to the spectator so forcibly and so rapidly the vices of a coarse and sensual epoch. Most of us have seen that grand picture in the Luxembourg at Paris, the _Décadence des Romains_ of Coutuse, with those stern citizens of the old Brutus stamp gazing in moody sorrow on the enervated patricians, crowned with flowers, golden-sandalled, purple-robed, rouged, and perfumed, lapped in feasting and luxury, and the false smiles of meretricious women; listening to dulcet music; sipping the Chian and the Falernian, babbling the scandal of the bath to their freedmen, or lisping sophisms in emasculated Greek to their hireling philosophers. One has but to glance at that picture to know that the empire is in a bad way; that certain Germanic barbarians are sharpening short swords or whittling clubs into shape far away, and that the Roman greatness is in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I remember once seeing in an old curiosity shop of the Rue Lafitte a water-colour drawing, probably limned by some rapin for some Sophie Arnould of the quarter, and sold at one of her periodical boudoir-and-alcove auctions—a drawing almost as eloquent and as suggestive as the _Décadence_. A group of ragged little boys, in the peasant costume of Louis the Well-Beloved’s time, have lifted up a heavy curtain. You see, beyond, the interior of a _petite maison_. Farmers general, marquises, abbés, are junketing with the Sophie Arnoulds of the epoch. The uplifted table-cloth shows the keys of a harpsichord beneath, on which one of the fair dames is tinkling. There are no servants to disturb the company; the dainty dishes rise through noiseless traps. Artificial flowers, champagne, wax candles, Sèvres china and _vermeil_ plate, diamonds, and embroidery: of all these there is an abundance. Outside, where the little ragged hungry boys are, you see snow and naked trees, and a little dead baby in a dead mother’s arms. A fanciful performance, and too violently strained, perhaps; yet one that tells, undeniably, that the age is going _wrong_; that this champagne will one day turn red as blood; that these wax candles will light a flame not to be put out, but that will burn the _petite maison_ about the ears of Farmers general, Sophie Arnoulds, and company; that the strumming of yonder harpsichord will be inaudible when the dreadful tocain begins to boom. I need but allude to the Dutch Kermesses of Teniers, and Ostade, and Jan Steen, and the camp-life pictures of Wouvermans and Dick Stoop, for those acquainted with those masters to understand the marvellous and instantaneous concentration of all the low, sordid, brutal passions and pastimes of the epoch; the daily life and sports and duties of the boor who swigs the beer and smokes the pipe;