do his very best according to his guiding spirit of thoroughness. Temperaments are so different. Whistler could not be Leighton. Because we admire the one, it is not necessary to decry the other; that is weak criticism, or rather none at all. The spirit which inspires the impressionist is not the spirit of design, but a limited observation in a very restricted area. We can have the Academic as well as the Impressionist: both are useful as foils to each other, and it is just as narrow of the Impressionists to want all men to see nature and art as they see them, as it has been for the Academics to see "nothing" in the newer if more limited system. I believe that Leighton's real love was early Italian art; all that came to him after was the result of growth. His enthusiasm for Mino da Fiesole, for the earlier Raphaels, for Duccio of Siena, for Lorenzetti, was evident and absorbing; other enthusiasms were more branches from the stem than its roots. He loved line; he found it there: he loved restraint of action, pure sensuous beauty; he found it in early Italian Art. The reserve of emotions touched him in Greek Art--its suavity, its almost geometrical precision, the tunefulness and melody of its rhythmical concords. His love of music was on the same lines: Wagner never appealed to him as Mozart did; it was too strenuous, too busy in changes of key, too incomplete in the finish and development of phrases. It was not that he liked dulness--not a bit; he was emotional, often gay, often depressed--excitable even; but to him Art was an intellectual more than a purely emotional system, and he liked it to be finished, consistent, perfect--and those qualities he strove for, without a doubt he obtained in a high measure. It will be long before we see again the like of Frederic Leighton, a man complete in himself. W.B. RICHMOND. _June 1906._ * * * * * I first met Leighton about 1869 or '70, I think. I went to one of his receptions at the Studio in Holland Park Road, at the time he was showing his pictures for the Academy. I think his principal work of that year was "Alcestis," or "Heracles Wrestling with Death." About the same time Browning's poem of "Balaustion's Adventure" appeared, in which he alludes to Leighton and this very picture in the lines beginning: "I know a great Kaunian painter" (if I remember rightly). I availed myself of a friend's introduction, and presented myself. One recalls the courteous and princely way in which he received his guests on these occasions, and the crushes he had at his studio--Holland Park Road blocked with carriages, and all the great ones of the London world flocking to see the artist's work.