DAUBIGNY. SPRINGTIME.] When they bore him from his house in the Faubour-Poissonière and a passer-by asked who was being buried, a fat shopwoman standing at the door of her house answered: "I don't know his name, but he was a good man." Beethoven's Symphony in C minor was played at his funeral, according to his own direction, and as the coffin was being lowered a lark rose exulting to the sky. "The artist will be replaced with difficulty, the man never," said Dupré at Corot's grave. On 27th May 1880 an unobtrusive monument to his memory was unveiled at the border of the lake at Ville d'Avray, in the midst of the dark forest where he had so often dreamed. He died in the fulness of his fame as an artist, but it was the forty pictures collected in the Centenary Exhibition of 1889 which first made the world fully conscious of what modern art possessed in Corot: a master of immortal masterpieces, the greatest poet and the tenderest soul of the nineteenth century, as Fra Angelico was the tenderest soul of the fifteenth, and Watteau the greatest poet of the eighteenth. [Illustration: _Baschet._ DAUBIGNY. A LOCK IN THE VALLY OF OPTEVOZ.] _Jules Dupré_, a melancholy spirit, who was inwardly consumed by a lonely existence spent in passionate work, stands as the Beethoven of modern painting beside Corot, its Mozart. If Théodore Rousseau was the epic poet of the Fontainebleau school, and Corot the idyllic poet, Dupré seems its tragic dramatist. Rousseau's nature is hard, rude, and indifferent to man. For Corot God is the great philanthropist, who wishes to see men happy, and lets the spring come and the warm winds blow only that children may have their pleasure in them. His soul is, as Goethe has it in _Werther_, "as blithe as those of sweet spring mornings." Jules Dupré has neither Rousseau's reality nor Corot's tenderness; his tones are neither imperturbable nor subdued. "_Quant derrière un tronc d'arbre ou derrière une pierre, vous ne trouvez pas un homme à quoi ça sert-il de faire du paysage._" In Corot there is a charm as of the light melodies of the _Zauberflöte_; in Dupré the ear is struck by the shattering notes of the _Sinfonie Eroica_. Rousseau looks into the heart of nature with widely dilated pupils and a critical glance. Corot woos her smiling, caressing, and dallying; Dupré courts her uttering impassioned complaint and with tears in his eyes. In him are heard the mighty fugues of Romanticism. The trees live, the waves laugh and weep, the sky sings and wails, and the sun, like a great conductor, determines the harmony of the concert. Even the two pictures with which he made an appearance in the Salon in 1835, after he had left the Sèvres china manufactory and become acquainted with Constable during a visit to England--the "Near Southampton" and "Pasture-land in the Limousin"--displayed him as an accomplished master. In "Near Southampton" everything moves and moans. Across an undulating country a