In these delicate mythological compositions a chord is struck which found no echo until, a generation later, it was heard again in the work of the French New Idealists and the English Pre-Raphaelites: there speaks in them a Romantic Hellenism, a something dreamily mystic, which makes him a remarkable link between Delacroix and the most refined spirit in the modern school, Gustave Moreau. It was purely an act of gratitude in Moreau when he affixed the dedication "To Théodore Chassériau" to his fine picture of "The Young Man and Death." _Léon Benouville_ will be remembered only for his picture of the "Death of St. Francis," in the Louvre, a good piece of work in the manner of the Quattrocento. _Léon Cogniet_ deserves to be mentioned because in the fifties he brought together in his studio so many foreign pupils, especially Germans. He enjoyed above all others the reputation of being able to initiate beginners both quickly and with certainty into the peculiar mysteries of craftsmanship. All that a master can teach, and that can be learned from his example, was to be obtained from this kind and fatherly instructor. Even after he had long given up painting, his grateful pupils used to meet together yearly at a banquet given in the patriarch's honour. As an artist he belongs to the list of the great men who have paid for overpraise in their lifetime by oblivion after their death. His "Massacre of the Innocents" of 1824--a woman who, mad with terror, thinks to hide herself and her child from the assassins of Bethlehem under an open stairway--could give pleasure only in a time which hailed with enthusiasm Ary Scheffer's heads resembling plaster busts full of expression. Occasionally, too, he painted landscapes--the chimerical, vague creations of a man who had lived but little in the open air. His finest picture, "Tintoretto Painting his Dead Daughter by Lamplight," of 1843, the engravings of which once enraptured France and Germany, has to-day a somewhat insipid effect, and shows whither his genius was leading him--in technique a coarser Schalcken, in sentiment a weaker Delaroche. [Illustration: COGNIET. TINTORETTO PAINTING HIS DEAD DAUGHTER.]