This reign of the subjective has brought in its train the undue monopolising of the world's most ardent interest in one passion. French novels of great literary power secured to it the monopoly in France, and magnates in æsthetic culture have grafted it on to our English taste. This strongest and most beautiful feeling in human nature has been so monotonously forced upon us in literature _à tort et à travers_--the assumption that this is the only feeling worth serious consideration has been dwelt on with such a tiresome pertinacity--it has been so often caricatured, so often debased in books and pictures, that even the real thing itself runs a danger of palling. This human passion may be the greatest, but it is not the only great feeling with which the lives of men and women are enriched; and surely the absorbing prominence which has been given to it latterly in literature is out of proportion with its real position in healthy lives. Little sympathy seems left for other deep and stirring emotions. In Leighton's art we find no monopoly of this kind either recorded or suggested. He painted the passion of lovers in the "Paolo and Francesca," but with no more sincere interest than he did other feelings; than, for instance, his fervent and reverent worship of art in "Cimabue's Madonna," or in the ecstasy of joy in the child flying into the embrace of her mother in "The Return of Persephone," or in the exquisite tender feeling of Elisha breathing renewed life into the Shunammite's son, or in that sense of rest and peace after struggle in the lovely figure of "Ariadne" when Death releases her from her pain; or in the yearning for that peace in the "King David": "Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away and be at rest." As the climax of nature's loveliest creations Leighton treated the human form with a courageous purity. In his undraped figures there is the same total absence of the mark of the degenerate as there is in everything he did and was; no remote hint of any _double-entendre_ veiled by æsthetic refinement, any more than there is in the Bible, the _Iliad_, or in the sculpture of Pheidias. To quote lines that were written about Leighton very shortly before his death:--