and has at bottom the feeling of a draughtsman; which is principally the reason why, at the present day, when one looks at Rousseau's pictures, one thinks rather of Hobbema than of Billotte and Claude Monet. His absolute mastery over drawing even induced him in his last years to abandon painting altogether. He designated it contemptuously as falsehood, because it smeared over the truth, the anatomy of nature. [Illustration: COROT. VUE DE TOSCANE.] In Rousseau there was even more the genius of a sculptor than of a portrait painter. His spirit, positive, exact, like that of a mathematician, and far more equipped with artistic precision than pictorial qualities, delighted in everything sharply defined, plastic, and full of repose: moss-grown stones, oaks of the growth of centuries, marshes and standing water, rude granite blocks of the forest of Fontainebleau, and trees bedded in the rocks of the glens of Opremont. In a quite peculiar sense was the oak his favourite tree--the mighty, wide-branching, primæval oak which occupies the centre of one of his masterpieces, "A Pond," and spreads its great gnarled boughs to the cloudy sky in almost every one of his pictures. It is only Rembrandt's three oaks that stand in like manner, firm and broad of stem, as though they were living personalities of the North, in a lonely field beneath the hissing rain. To ensure the absolute vitality of organisms was for Rousseau the object of unintermittent toil. [Illustration: COROT. AT SUNSET.]