It was _Ernest Hébert_ who first saw Italy with the eyes of a painter. He might be called the Perugino of this group. He was the most romantic of the pupils of Delaroche, and owed his conception of colour to that painter. His spiritual father was Ary Scheffer. The latter has discovered the poetry of sentimentality; Hébert the poetry of disease. His pictures are invariably of great technical delicacy. His style has something femininely gracious, almost languishing: his colouring is delicately fragrant and tenderly melting. He is, indeed, a refined artist who occupies a place by himself, however mannered the melancholy and sickliness of his figures may be. In "The Malaria" of 1850 they were influenced by the subject itself. The barge gliding over the waters of the Pontine Marshes, with its freight of men, women, and children, seems like a gloomy symbol of the voyage of life; the sorrow of the passengers is that of resignation: dying they droop their heads like withering flowers. But later the fever became chronic in Hébert. The interesting disease returned even where it was out of place, as it does still in the pictures of his followers. The same fate befell the painters of Italy which befalls tourists. What Robert had seen in the country as the first comer whole generations saw after him, neither more nor less than that. The pictures were always variations on the old theme, until in the sixties Bonnat came with his individual and realistic vision. [Illustration: _Portfolio._ HÉBERT. THE MALARIA.]