three foreground trumpeters, conspicuous on the carpeted dais, seem to be trumpeting for their lives. The golden, cavernous trumpet-mouth pointing directly at us has a strangely inspiring effect, seeming to invade us with sound breaking on the heavy roll of the meditative drummer. The music connects itself with the background and helps to widen the horizon. There is not one of these pictures which is not enlarged by the suggestion, at least, of some wide background of nature. Sometimes, as in these jubilant scenes, it enhances and extends the gladness of the festival, sometimes it wings our spirits amid conditions that burden and confine. In the first of the _St. Jerome_ series, for instance, where the lion arrives, the first point that strikes us is the obvious humour of the scene, the effect of the entry of this gentlest and most companionable of beasts on the Brethren of the cloister. They do not wait to determine its intentions: it is a lion. It is wounded and asking sympathy, but the Brothers have attention for nothing but their fears. But below the humour there is tragedy. It is not the quaintness of the lion, or the scattering monks, or the beasts on the grassy square, or all the varied monotony of that beautiful frescoed cloister, that claim our attention as the heart of the picture. It is the bent and aged figure of St. Jerome. His features are the same as in the study scene, but his mature youth has given place to snowy age. And another change has come over his face; the radiance of the study scene is replaced by bewildered sorrow slightly touched with contempt. A loneliness is now in his face. In his study he was at peace communing with other minds or with the mind of God. But here with the monks he is bewildered--bewildered and oppressed. We seem to see him ageing as he eyes his foolish companions. Is this, he seems to question, the fruit of his long sojourn? He has asked the sympathy of the Brothers, and they are beside themselves with fear. There is deep pathos in this aged figure making his appeal in vain, and if the cloister filled the horizon, the effect on our spirits would be stifling. But there is a great sky overhead, there is an orange tree, “that busy plant,” there is a winding way amidst the vista of palm trees and blue hills, there is the great desert whence the lion has come. _The Death of St. Jerome_ affords a still more impressive example of this kind of relief. Here we are not walled in, the desert is around us; we see it through the gateway by the well and through the porticoes of the buildings, and above it in purple outline rise the snow-capped mountains. And this wide horizon is peculiarly welcome as an escape from the confinement of spirit expressed in the funeral procession. The gladness of the open country, the hills and mountains, the palm-tree signposts along the desert way, are a relief to the lion’s agony. For the lion is the keynote of the picture, though it