the bright light of a May morning, the song of nightingales in the grand foliage of overhanging magnolia trees echoed the sound of the water springing from the glistening lip, and flowing over the clean curve of the marble basin into the trough below. There was the same lion's head which served as spout, the same arrangement of ornament encircling it; also a finely shaped pitcher placed below to catch the water, and--more recalling than any detail--was the echo of the real motive of the picture--the dream-like poetry of the sunlit scene, with the musical accompaniment of trickling water. Had Leighton painted a Discobolus, it would probably never have occurred to most English critics that nature and living action had inspired the work. Above the lake of Albano is a road--"the Upper Gallery"--where every day are to be met men playing the game. Any one watching it may see repeated over and over again the action in the well-known statue. Nature inspired the creations of the great ancients, and it was also invariably first-hand impressions from nature that inspired Leighton's creations, whatever superstructure of learning he added in the course of their development. Living in Italy when his feelings were most sensitive to impressions, the origin of the suggestions he imbibed is to be found in her atmosphere, colouring, and the scenes which surrounded him when his imagination was most free and fertile. Later, when he lived in England, his travels in Italy and Greece supplied him with the subjects for the most beautiful sketches he made direct from nature. No one, I believe, has ever painted the luminous quality of white, as it is seen under heated sunlight in the South, with the same charm as Leighton. The sketches he made of buildings in Capri[4] are quite marvellously true in their rendering of such effects. He made equally beautiful studies of mountains and sea, under the rarefied atmosphere of Greece. He seemed always happiest, I think, when the key of his pictures and sketches was light and sunlit; in such pictures, for instance, as "Winding the Skein," "Greek Girls Picking up Shells by the Seashore," "Bath of Psyche," "Invocation," and others remarkable for their fairness and their light, pure tone.