Briton-Rivière is descended from a French family which found its way into England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and he is one of those painters--so frequent in English art--whose nature has developed early: when he was fourteen he left school, exhibited in the Academy when he was eighteen, painted as a pre-Raphaelite between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and graduated at Oxford at seven-and-twenty. In his youth he divided his time between art and scholarship--painting pictures and studying Greek and Latin literature. Thus he became a painter of animals, having also an enthusiasm for the Greek poets, and he has stood for a generation as an uncontested lord and master on his own peculiar ground. In his first important picture, of 1871, the comrades of Ulysses, changed into swine, troop grunting round the enchantress Circe. In the masterpiece of 1872 the Prophet Daniel stands unmoved and submissive to the will of God amid the lions roaring and showing their teeth, ready to spring upon him in their hunger, yet regarding him with a mysterious fear, spellbound by the power of his eye; while his great picture "Persepolis" makes the appeal of a page from the philosophy of history, with its lions roaming majestically amid the ruins of human grandeur and human civilisation, which are flooded with moonlight. The picture "In Manus Tuas, Domine," showed St. George riding solitary through the lonely and silent recesses of a primitive forest upon a pale white horse. He is armed in mail and has a mighty sword; a deep seriousness is imprinted on his features, for he has gone forth to slay the dragon. In yet another picture, "An Old-World Wanderer," a man of the early ages has come ashore upon an untrodden island, and is encompassed by flocks of great white birds, fluttering round him with curiosity and confidence, as yet ignorant of the fear of human beings. The picture of 1891, "A Mighty Hunter before the Lord," is one of his most poetic night-pieces: Nimrod is returning home, and beneath the silvery silence of the moon the dead and dying creatures which he has laid low upon the wide Assyrian plain are tended and bemoaned by their mates. [Illustration: _Scribner._ ALBERT MOORE. MIDSUMMER. (_By permission of Messrs. Cadbury, Jones & Co., the owners of the copyright._)] [Illustration: ALBERT MOORE. COMPANIONS. (_By permission of Messrs. Dowdeswell & Dowdeswells, the owners of the copyright._)]