Beside this painted plea against capital punishment hangs "The Burnt Child," as an argument in favour of _crêches_. A poor working woman has for one moment left her garret. Meanwhile a fire has broken out, and she returns to find the charred body of her boy. In the picture "Hunger, Madness, and Crime" he treats of human misery in general, and touches on the question of the rearing of illegitimate children. There is a young girl forced to live on the carrots which a rich man throws into the gutter. In consequence of a notification to pay taxes she goes out of her mind, and with hellish laughter cuts to pieces the baby who has brought her to ruin. Cremation is recommended in the picture "Buried too soon": there is a vault, and in it a coffin, the lid of which has been burst open from the inside; through the cleft may be seen a clenched hand, and in the darkness of the coffin the horror-stricken countenance of one who is piteously crying for help. In the "Novel Reader" he endeavours to show the baneful influence of vicious reading upon the imagination of a girl. She is lying naked in bed, with loosened hair and a book in her hand; her eyes are reddened with hysterical tears, and an evil spirit is laying a new book on the couch, _Antonine_, by Alexandre Dumas _Fils_. "The Retort of a Belgian Lady"--an anticipation of Neid--glorifies homicide committed in the defence of honour. A Dutch officer having taken liberties with a Belgian woman, she blows out his brains with a pistol. In "The Suicide" the fragments of a skull may be seen flying in all directions. How the young man who has just destroyed himself came to this pass may be gathered from the book entitled _Materialism_, which lies on his table. And thus he goes on, though the spectator feels less and less inclined to take any serious interest in these lectures. For although the intentions of Wiertz had now and then a touch of the sublime, he was neither clear as to the limits of what could be represented nor did he possess the capacity of expressing what he wished in artistic forms. Like many a German painter of those years, he was a philosopher of the brush, a scholar in disguise, who wrote out his thoughts in paint instead of ink.