One can pass rapidly over this first section of Corot's work. His pictures of this period are not without merit, but to speak of them with justice they should be compared with contemporary Classical productions. Then one finds in them broad and sure drawing, and can recognise a powerful hand and notice an astonishing increase of ability. Even on his second sojourn in Italy he painted no longer as an ethnographical student, and no longer wasted his powers on detail. But it is in the pictures of his last twenty years that Corot first becomes the Theocritus of the nineteenth century. The second Corot has spoilt one's enjoyment for the first. But who would care to pick a quarrel with him on that score! Beside his later pictures how hard are those studies from Rome, which the dying painter left to the Louvre, and which, as his maiden efforts, he regarded with great tenderness all through his life. How little they have of the delicate, harmonious light of his later works! The great historical landscape with Homer in it, where light and shadow are placed so trenchantly beside each other, the landscape "Aricia," "Saint Jerome in the Desert," the picture of the young girl sitting reading beside a mountain stream, "The Beggar" with that team in mad career which Decamps could not have painted with greater virtuosity,--they are all good pictures by the side of those of his contemporaries, but in comparison with real Corots they are like the exercises of a pupil, in their hard, dry painting, their black, coarse tones, and their chalky wall of atmosphere. There is neither breeze nor transparency nor life in the air; the trees are motionless, and look as if they were heavily cased in iron. [Illustration: _Baschet._ DUPRÉ. NEAR SOUTHAMPTON. (_By permission of M. Jules Beer, the owner of the picture._)]