bad actors, scrupulously arrayed and making pathetic gestures. Their action has been studied from drawing-school copies; no genuine cry of passion ever breaks through. Heads, hands, and outlines have all a sickly idealism; a studious and sedulously polished manner of painting has ruined the intrinsic spirit of the work as a whole. Théophile Gautier was right when he wrote of Gallait: "_Tout le talent_ _qu'on peut acquérir avec du travail, du goût, du jugememt, et de la volonté, M. Gallait le possède._" Gallait's "Last Obsequies," hung in that same Salon of 1850 which contained Courbet's "Stone-breakers," and the words of recognition accorded to it, were the last obsequies given to the parting genius of historical painting. A few years went by, and Gallait's fame died away. After 1851 he painted fourteen other great historical pictures ("Egmont's Last Moments," "Johanna the Mad by the Corpse of her Husband," "Alva at the Window during the Execution of the two Counts," etc.), and, occasionally, sentimental _genre_ pictures, such as "The Oblivion of Sorrow" in the Berlin National Gallery; in this a small boy is playing the fiddle for the consolation of his sister, who had sunk upon the high-road exhausted by hunger. He also painted many portraits. But nothing gave him a niche in the memory of his contemporaries. "The Pest at Tournai," painted in 1882, was a work extremely creditable to his old age; it was nevertheless a picture which appeared to another generation merely as a phantom; and when, on 20th November 1887, the announcement of his death passed through the land, it came unexpectedly, like that of a person already believed to have been long dead. [Illustration: _Bruyllant, Brussels._ GALLAIT. EGMONT'S LAST MOMENTS.]