_Thomas Couture_, who after Delaroche was most in vogue as a teacher in the fifties, was of greater importance as an artist, and in his "Romans of the Decadence" produced a work which, from the point of view of the Juste-milieu, is worthy of consideration even to-day. He was a remarkable man. His parents, shoemakers at Senlis, seem to have regarded the thick-headed, slowly developing boy as a kind of idiot, and are said to have treated him with no excessive gentleness. He was sent away from school because he could not understand the simplest things, and studied without success in the studios of Gros and Delaroche. And yet, after he had made his début in the Salon of 1843 with the "Troubadour," a fine picture in the style of Devéria, his "Orgie Romaine" of 1847 made him at one stroke the most celebrated painter in France. Pupils thronged to him from every quarter of the globe, and he left a deep and enduring impression upon every one of them. A very short, corpulent, broad-shouldered, thick-set, proletarian figure, with thick disorderly hair, a blouse, a short pipe, and a gruff manner, he used to stride through the lines of his pupils, who regarded him with wonder on account of his ability as a teacher and his remarkable powers. [Illustration: _Baschet._ COUTURE. THE ROMANS OF THE DECADENCE.] Yet, when a few years had elapsed, no one heard of him again. After his "Love of Gold" and a couple of portraits, he felt that he was unfruitful, and gave up the battle. "The Falconer," an excellent picture, with charming qualities of colour, was the last work to give any proof of Couture's technical mastery. He fell out with Napoleon, who wished to employ him; made many enemies by his writings, especially among the followers of Delacroix, whom he criticised beyond measure; and finally, embittered, and abandoning all artistic work, he buried himself in his country place at Villers de Bel, near Paris. Thither Americans and Englishmen used to come to order pictures of him, and were much astonished to hear that the old gardener's assistant, as they took him to be, sitting on the grass and mending shoes or old kettles, was Couture. The news of his death in 1879 caused general astonishment; it was as if one long buried had come to life again. It had meanwhile become evident that even his "Romans of the Decadence" was only a work of compromise, the whole novelty of which consisted in forcing the results attained by the Romantic school in colouring into that bed of Procrustes, the formulæ of idealism. The work is undoubtedly very noble in colouring, but what would not Delacroix have made of such a theme! or Rubens, indeed, whose Flemish "Kermesse" hangs not far from it in the Louvre. Couture's figures have only "absolute beauty," nothing individual; far less do they exhibit the unnerved sensuality of Romans of the decline engaged in their orgies. They are merely posing, and find their classical postures wearisome. They are not revelling, they do not