"_Rousseau c'est un aigle. Quant à moi, je ne suis qu'une alouette qui pousse de petites chansons dans mes nuages gris._" With these words _Camille Corot_ has indicated the distinction between Rousseau and himself. They denote the two opposite poles of modern landscape. What attracted the plastic artists, Rousseau, Ruysdael, and Hobbema--the relief of objects, the power of contours, the solidity of forms--was not Corot's concern. Whilst Rousseau never spoke about colour with his pupils, but as _ceterum censeo_ invariably repeated, "_Enfin, la forme est la première chose à observer_," Corot himself admitted that drawing was not his strong point. When he tried to paint rocks he was but moderately effective, and all his efforts at drawing the human figure were seldom crowned with real success, although in his last years he returned to the task with continuous zeal. Apart from such peculiar exceptions as that wonderful picture "The Toilet," his figures are always the weakest part of his landscapes, and only have a good effect when in the background they reveal their delicate outlines, half lost in rosy haze. He was not much more felicitous with his animals, and in particular there often appear in his pictures great heavy cows, which are badly planted on their feet, and which one wishes that he had left out. Amongst trees he did not care to paint the oak, the favourite tree with all artists who have a passion for form, nor the chestnut, nor the elm, but preferred to summon, amid the delicate play of sunbeams, the aspen, the poplar, the alder, the birch with its white slender stem and its pale, tremulous leaves, and the willow with its light foliage. In Rousseau a tree is a proud, toughly knotted personality, a noble, self-conscious creation; in Corot it is a soft tremulous being rocking in the fragrant air, in which it whispers and murmurs of love and joy. His favourite season was not the autumn, when the turning leaves, hard as steel, stand out with firm lines, quiet and motionless, against the clear sky, but the early spring, when the farthest twigs upon the boughs deck themselves with little leaves of tender green, which vibrate and quiver with the least breath of air. He had, moreover, a perfectly wonderful secret of rendering the effect of the tiny blades of grass and the flowers which grow upon the meadows in June; he delighted to paint the banks of a stream with tall bushes bending to the water, and he loved water itself in undetermined clearness and in the shifting glance of light, leaving it here in shadow and touching it there with brightness; the sky in the depths beneath wedded to the bright border of the pool or the vanishing outlines of the bank, and the clouds floating across the sky, and here and there embracing a light shining fragment of the blue. He loved morning before sunrise, when the white mists hover over pools like a light veil of gauze, and gradually disperse as the sun