Already in his first notable works, in 1831, "The Princes in the Tower" and "Oliver Cromwell," he has fully assumed his lukewarm manner. He might have represented the murder of the princes, but fearing that the public would not stand it, he preferred merely to suggest the approaching death of the weeping and terrified children by placing in front of the bed a small dog, which is looking uneasily towards the door, where the red light of torches indicates the approach of the assassins,--a Düsseldorf picture with improved technique. It is just the same with his melodramatic and lachrymose "Cromwell." It would be hardly possible to represent one of the greatest figures in universal history in a more paltry manner, and to this day it is not quite certain whether the picture was intended to be serious or humorous. The great statesman in whom was embodied the political and ecclesiastical revolution of England must have been extremely busy on the day of Charles I's funeral, and have had better things to do than stealthily to open the coffin and contemplate, with a mixture of childish curiosity and sentimental pity, the corpse of the king whom he had fought and conquered. Eugène Delacroix had treated this subject in a sketch, in which Cromwell, at the funeral of Charles, gazes in quiet contempt upon the weak monarch who had not known how to keep either his crown or his head. As a work of art this little water-colour is worth ten times as much as Delaroche's great, long-meditated, carefully executed painting. From the very beginning he had no sense for the passionate or dramatic. From the first day, had the tailor who prepared costumes struck work, his artistic greatness would have fallen away to nothing; from the commencement he produced nothing but large, clumsily conceived illustrations for historical novels. Planché pointed out long ago that all the costumes are glaringly new, that all the victims look as if they had got themselves up for a masked ball, that this sort of painting is much too clean and pretty to give the argument the appearance of probability. Théophile Gautier, who had proclaimed the powerful originality of Delacroix, fumed with rage against these "saliva-polished representations, this art for the half-educated, disguised in false, Philistine realism, this art of historical illustration for the familiar use of the _bourgeois_." To rank timorous, half-hearted talent higher than reckless and awe-inspiring genius--this was in Gautier's eyes the sin against the Holy Ghost, and he sprang like a tiger upon the popularity of talents such as these. He could, as he himself said, have swallowed Delaroche, skin, hair, and all, without remorse; meanwhile, the public raised him upon the shield as its declared favourite.