He won the intellectual middle class over to himself with a rush, as he industriously went on rummaging in manuals of French and English history for royal murders and battle-deaths of kings. With his "Richelieu," "Mazarin," and "Strafford," but especially with his "Execution of Lady Jane Grey" and "Murder of the Duke of Guise in the Castle of Blois," he made hits such as no other French artist of his time could put to his account. Just then, in his youthful work, _The States-General at Blois_, Ludovic Vitet had put the murder of the Duke of Guise upon the stage. Nothing could be better-timed than to transform this operatic scene into colour. The historians of civilisation admired the historical accuracy of the courtiers' dress, all the upholstery of the room, the lofty mantelpiece, the carved wardrobes, the praying-stool with the altar-piece over it, the canopy-bed with its curtains of red silk embroidered with lilies and the king's initials in gold. Playgoers compared the scene with that which they had witnessed on the stage in Vitet's piece, and the comparison was not unfavourable to the painter. For Delaroche, in order to be as far as possible in keeping with the stage representation, was accustomed to commission Jollivet, the chief mechanician of the Opera House, to prepare for him small models of rooms, in which he then arranged his lay-figures. That is the further great difference between Delaroche and Delacroix, between the vagrant painter of history and the artist. The latter had the gift of the inner vision, and only painted things which had intellectually laid hold upon him and had assumed firm shape in his imagination. It was while the organ was playing the _Dies iræ_ that he saw his "Pietà" in a vision--that mighty work which in power of expression almost approaches Rembrandt. "Is not Tasso's life most interesting?" he writes. "You weep for him, swaying restlessly from side to side on your chair, when you read the story of his life; your eyes assume a threatening aspect, and you grind your teeth with rage." Such passionate emotion was wholly unknown to Delaroche; he painted deeds of murder with the wildness of Mieris. Delacroix everywhere grasps what is essential, and gives to every scene its poetical or religious character. A couple of lines are for him sufficient means wherewith to produce a deep impression. In presence of his pictures one does not think of costumes; one sees everywhere passion overflowing with love and anger, and is intoxicated with the harmony of sentiment and colour. Delaroche, like Thierry, had merely a predilection for the historical anecdote which, dramatically pointed, keeps the beholder in suspense, or else, simply narrated, amuses him. The colour and spirit of events had no power over his imagination; he merely apprehended them with a cool understanding, and put them laboriously together in keeping with it. Delacroix sought counsel from nature; but in the moment of creation, in