On a strip of ground in the suburbs of Paris, where the town has come to an end and the country has not yet begun, _Raffaelli_, perhaps the most spirited of the Naturalists, has taken up his abode. He has painted the workman, the vagabond, the restlessness of the man who does not know where he is going to eat and sleep; the small householder, who has all he wants; the ruined man, overtaken by misfortune, whose only remaining passion is the brandy-bottle,--he has painted them all amid the melancholy landscape around Paris, with its meagre region still in embryo, and its great straight roads losing themselves disconsolately in the horizon. Théophile Gautier has written somewhere that the geometricians are the ruination of landscapes. If he lived in these days he would find, on the contrary, that those monotonous roads running straight as a die give landscape a strange and melancholy grandeur. One thinks of the passage in Zola's _Germinal_, where the two socialists, Étienne and Suwarin, walk in the evening silently along the edge of a canal, which, with the perpendicular stems of trees at its side, stretches for miles, as if measured with a pair of compasses, through a monotonous flat landscape. Only a few low houses standing apart break the straight line of the horizon; only here and there, in the distance, does there emerge a human being, whose diminished figure is scarcely perceptible above the ground. Raffaelli was the first to understand the virginal beauty of these localities, the dumb complaining language of poverty-stricken regions spreading languidly beneath a dreary sky. He is the painter of poor people and of wide horizons, the poet and historian of humanity living in the neighbourhood of great cities. There sits a house-owner, or the proprietor of a shop, in front of his own door; there a pedlar, or a man delivering parcels, hurries across the field; there a rag-picker's dog strays hungry about a lonely farmyard. Sometimes the wide landscapes are relieved by the manufactories, water and gas-works which feed the huge crater of Paris. At other times the snow lies on the ground, the skeletons of trees stand along the high-road, and a driver shouts to his team; the heavy cart-horses covered with worsted cloths, shiver, and an impression of intense cold strikes through you to your very bones. Indeed, Raffaelli's austerity was first subdued a little when he came to make a lengthy residence in England. Then he acquired a preference for the light-coloured atmosphere and the gracious verdure of nature in England. He began to take pleasure in tender spring landscapes, in place of rigid scenes of snow. The poor soil no longer seems so hard and inhospitable, but becomes attractive beneath the soft, peaceful, bluish atmosphere. Even the uncivilised beings, with famine in their eyes, who wandered about in his earliest pictures, become milder and more resigned. The grandfather, in his