“A Prince of Court Painters” is the story of Antony Watteau told in the home-keeping journal of a girl of his own age, daughter of a craftsman of Valenciennes, who perhaps loves him, though with the reticence so characteristic of the author this only emerges in a shadowy hint here and there. The journal is extraordinarily graceful, and exhibits, to give it verisimilitude, many French turns of expression and phrase, as though it had been originally conceived in French; but the whole lacks vital truth; there is too much philosophy of a hinted kind, too much criticism; the omission, for instance, of a dozen deliberate phrases indicating the supposed sex of the writer, might convert the whole into the work of a pensive man. There is little sentiment or emotion, though it is faintly illuminated as by a setting sun with a tender aloofness, a spectacular dreamfulness—a beautiful quality and finely conceived, but yet with little hold on nature. There is a characteristic thread of personal interest interwoven with the story. The girl who writes the journal is the sister of Jean Baptiste Pater, the pupil of Watteau; and the artistic progress of her brother, his enthusiastic admiration for his master, his patient development, which is sharply contrasted with the fitful and restless energy of Watteau, plays a real though a secondary part in the study. It is also highly characteristic of Pater’s reticent delicacy that, though he liked to fancy the painter a collateral member of his own family, the actual name of Pater is never introduced into the piece, the brother figuring throughout simply as Jean Baptiste. But there is an abundance of fine criticism both of life and art in the whole picture. Could the charm of Watteau be more delicately captured than in the following passage?— “And at last one has actual sight of his work—what it is. He has brought with him certain long-cherished designs to finish here in quiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That charming _Noblesse_—can it be really so distinguished to the minutest point, so naturally aristocratic? Half in masquerade, playing the drawing-room or garden comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not less than the landscape he composes, and among the accidents of which they group themselves with such a perfect fittingness, a certain light we should seek for in vain upon anything real. For their framework they have around them a veritable architecture—a tree-architecture—to which those moss-grown balusters, _termes_, statues, fountains, are really but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find myself always saying to myself involuntarily, ‘The evening will be a wet one.’ The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular trees themselves will hardly outlast another generation.”