inhabitants still sat in the sun as if cemented to the ground, and wore the same costumes in which their forefathers had sat there two thousand years ago. Here the Romanticists not only found nature decked in the rich hues which satisfied their passion for colour, but discovered a race of people possessed of that beauty which, according to the Classicists, was only to be seen in the Italian peasants. They beheld "men of innate dignity and remarkable distinction of pose and gesture." Thus a new experience was added to life. There was the East, where splendour and simplicity, cruelty and beauty, softness of temper and savage austerity, and brilliant colour and blinding light are more completely mingled than anywhere else in the world; there was the East, where rich tints laugh in the midst of squalor and misery, the brightness of earlier days in the midst of outworn usages, and the pride of art in the midst of ruined villages. It was so great, so unfathomable, and so like a fairy tale that it gave every one the chance of discovering in it some new qualities. For _Delacroix_, the Byron of painting, it was a splendid setting for passion in its unfettered wildness and its unscrupulous daring. He, who had lived exclusively in the past, now turned to the observation of living beings, as may be seen in his "Algerian Women," his "Jewish Wedding," his "Emperor of Morocco," and his "Convulsionaries of Tangier." Amongst the Orientals he also found the hotly flaming sensuousness and primitive wildness which beset his imagination with its craving for everything impassioned. The great _charmeur_, the master of pictorial caprice, _Decamps_, found his province in the East, because its sun was so lustrous, its costume so bright, and its human figures so picturesque. If Delacroix was a powerful artist, Decamps was no more than a painter,--but painter he was to his finger-tips. He was indifferent to nothing in nature or history: he showed as much enthusiasm for a pair of tanned beggar-boys playing in the sunshine at the corner of a wall as for Biblical figures and old-world epics. He has painted hens pecking on a dung-heap, dogs on the chase and in the kennel, monkeys as scholars, and musicians in all the situations which Teniers and Chardin loved. His "Battle of Tailleborg" of 1837 has been aptly termed the only picture of a battle in the Versailles Museum. He looked on everything as material for painting, and never troubled as to how another artist would have treated the subject. There is an individuality in every one of his works; not an individuality of the first order, but one that is decidedly charming and that assures him a very high place amongst his contemporaries.