costumes, vessels, interiors, etc., may be ever so true to nature in details, but this mosaic work is bound systematically to destroy the pictorial appearance, unity, and quietude of the whole. Knaus is perhaps the only one who, as a fine connoisseur of colour, concealed this scrap-book drudgery, and achieved a certain congruity of colour in a really artistic manner by a subtilised method of harmony. But as regards the pictures of all the others, it is clear at once that, as Heine wrote, "they have been rather edited than painted." The effectiveness of the picture was lost in the detail, and even the truth of detail was lost in the end in the opulence of subject, seductive as that was upon the first glance. For, as it was held that the incident subjected to treatment--the more circumstantial the better--ought to be mirrored through all grades and variations of emotion in the faces, in the gestures of a family, of the gossips, of the neighbours, of the public in the street, the inevitable consequence was that the artist, to make himself understood, was invariably driven to exaggerate the characterisation, and to set in the place of the unconstrained expression of nature that which has been histrionically drilled into the model. Not less did the attempt to unite these set figures as a composition in one frame lead to an intolerable stencilling. The rules derived from historical painting in a time dominated by that form of art were applied to our chequered and many-sided modern life. Since the structure of this composition prescribed laws from which the undesigned manifestation of individual objects is free, the studies after nature had to be readjusted in the picture according to necessity. There were attitudes in a conventional sense beautiful, but unnatural and strained, and therefore creating an unpleasing effect. An arbitrary construction, a forced method of composition, usurped the place of what was flexible, various, and apparently casual. The painters did not fit the separate part as it really was into the totality which the coherence of life demands: they arranged scenes of comedy out of realistic elements just as a stage manager would put them together.