in 1870, he attained the limit of sugary affectation: a young girl has sunk on her knees, and, with dreamily uplifted eyes, offers to the Stuart King who is going to his death--a rose! Wappers is merely a reflex of French Romanticism, although he cannot be brought into direct comparison with any Parisian master. The passion of Delacroix stirred him but little: nothing points to a relationship between him and that great spirit. One is rather reminded of Alfred Johannot, whom he resembles in his entire gamut of emotion as in his treatment and selection of subjects. In both may be found elegance of line, Byronic emphasis, histrionic gestures, and the same stage properties borrowed from the theatre; never the genuine movement of feeling, only empty and distorted grimaces. Of the others who appeared with him the same may be said. All Belgian matadors of the forties and fifties came to grief, and are interesting in the history of art only as symptomatic phenomena, as members of that school of Delaroche which encompassed the world. They abandoned the antique marble, the chlamys, and the leaden forms of the Classicists, to set in their place a motley picture of the Middle Ages, made up of cuirasses, mail-shirts, fleshings, and velvet and silken doublets. One convention followed the other, and pedantic dryness was replaced by melancholy sentimentalism. As skilled practitioners they understood the sleights of their art, but never rose to individual creation. Amongst many painters there was not a single artist. As regards _De Keyzer_, it seems as if throughout his whole life he had wished to remain true to the memory of his benefactress: a simpering feminine trait runs with enervating sweetness through all his works, even through that "Battle of the Spurs" which founded his reputation. According to old writers, the athletic bodies of the Flemings were the terror of the French chivalry at Courtrai. De Keyzer has made of them mere plaster figures, and the pale, meagre colouring is in keeping with the languid conception. In the battles of Woeringen, of Senef, and Nieuwpoort, which followed on this picture, and were executed for the Belgian and Dutch Government, he succeeded still less in overcoming his affectation; and he first found the fitting province for his mild and correct talent when in later years he began to render little anecdotes of the Emperor Maximilian or Justus Lipsius out of the studio of Rubens or Memlinc. For these there was need of little but a certain superficial play of colour and an elegant painting of textures. [Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._ SLINGENEYER. THE AVENGER.]