'Women were selling coffee and soup. A small crowd of customers had gathered round a large kettle of cabbage soup which smoked on a tiny brazier. The woman, armed with a long ladle, first put into a yellow bowl thin slices of bread, which she took from a basket covered with a napkin, and then filled up the bowl with soup. There were clean market-gardeners in blouses; dirty porters with their shoulders soiled by the burdens they had carried; poor devils in rags--in short, all sorts of people--eating their breakfast, and scalding themselves with the hot soup. The painter was delighted, and half shut his eyes to compose his picture. But the smell of the cabbage soup was terribly strong. Florent turned away his head--the sight made him dizzy.' Here we have a Rembrandtesque study of hunger and endurance, with all the accessories put into quiet order. The second sketch which I take is from an essay by Walt Whitman on the death of President Lincoln. We all know how he (Abraham Lincoln) was shot in the theatre, and in those few jerky commonplace sentences Walt Whitman, the American Michael Angelo of words, presents to us as grim and gruesome a picture as I know anywhere. It has more of the loose but massive work of our English realist, Millais, about it than the compacter work of Rembrandt. It has a day-light or surrounding gas-light effect about it also, and little shadow or mystery, but it is to me blood-curdling in its startling distinctness.[3] You have here a scene as filled out with detail in the light as Albert Dürer's 'Melancholy' in the shadow. Walt Whitman has not omitted a single object which impressed him at the time--in fact, he tells us the whole dire tragedy by the aid of animate or inanimate objects not at all connected, except by association, with the murder; and this I wish you to remember strictly--how, by the placing and building up of objects, chairs, tables, flags, as here, all leading out from the centre of sight, which is the tale, you may suggest a deed without showing the main actors of it at all. Witness here that the principal figure, Abraham Lincoln, is never seen. The third illustration which I take is from that well-known poem by Bell on Mary Queen of Scots. I choose the closing act, her execution, as it embraces within the lines leading up to the climax the incidents of the verses going before, and because it is here that you see distinctly surrounding the principal character (our unfortunate Queen) trivial and more important items, all leading up to the loneliness of the victim and the fickleness of fortune.