front of the canvas, he could not bear direct contact with it. "The influence of the model," he wrote, "lowers the painter's tone; a stupid fellow makes you stupid." Delaroche draped his models as was required, made them posture and pull faces, and while he was painting, laboriously screwed them up to the pathos demanded by the situation. Such a method of procedure must necessarily become theatrical. Just as in his historical pictures he endeavoured to transform Delacroix's passion into operatic scenes, so he perfected his position as a man of compromise by imitating the academic style in his "Hemicycle." Here it was Ingres' laurels which robbed him of his sleep. The fame which this picture has acquired is mainly due to Henriquel Dupont's fine engraving. It does not attain to any kind of solemn or serious effect. One might imagine one's self in some entirely prosaic waiting-room, where all the great men of every age have agreed to meet together for no matter what ceremonial purpose; one sees there a carefully chosen collection of costumes of all epochs, with well-studied but expressionless portraits of the leaders of civilisation. Here also Delaroche has not risen above respectable mediocrity, and his characteristics remain, as ever, thoroughly middle-class. [Illustration: COUTURE. THE LOVE OF GOLD.] His likeness of Napoleon is perhaps that which shows most clearly how paltry a soul this painter possessed. It is not Devastation in human shape, not the man in whom his officers saw the "God of War" and of whom Mme. de Staël said, "There is nothing human left in him." The intellect of that Corsican, with his great thoughts striding as in seven-leagued boots, thoughts each of which would give any single German writer material for the rest of his life, was hidden to the inquisitive glance of a painter who had never seen in the whole of human history anything more than a series of petty episodes. And one who is not able to paint a good portrait is not justified in intruding into other regions of art. For similar reasons the religious paintings with which he busied himself in his last days have likewise enriched art with no new element. They are a Philistine remodelling of the Biblical drama, in the same style as his historical pictures. In the end he appears himself to have become conscious how little laborious compilations of this kind have in common with art, and since with the best will in the world he could produce nothing better than he had painted in the thirties, he lost all pleasure in his vocation and abandoned himself to gloom and pessimism, from which death set him free in 1856.