eart! He has withstood that hardening of the moral and physical fibre
which comes over so many men as they near their fortieth year. He
shows a brave front to work and to life. He is cheerful, with the manly
cheerfulness of a noble heart resigned to life's disillusions.

When I enter his home, I nearly always find him sitting before a
small ground-glass window in the corner of his studio, bent over some
engraving. I have leave to enter at all hours. He is free not to stir
from his work. "Good-day," he calls out, without raising his head,
without knowing for certain who has come in, and goes on with the
engraving he has in hand. I settle down at the end of the room, on
the sofa with the faded cover, and, until Lampron deigns to grant me
audience, I am free to sleep, or smoke, or turn over the wonderful
drawings that lean against the walls. Among them are treasures beyond
price; for Lampron is a genius whose only mistake is to live and act
with modesty, so that as yet people only say that he has "immense
talent." No painter or engraver of repute--and he is both--has served a
more conscientious apprenticeship, or sets greater store on thoroughness
in his art. His drawing is correct beyond reproach--a little stiff, like
the early painters. You can guess from his works his partiality for the
old masters--Perugino, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Memling, Holbein--who,
though not the masters in fashion, will always be masters in vigor of
outline, directness, in simple grace, and genuine feeling. He has copied
in oils, water-colors, pen, or pencil, nearly all the pictures of these
masters in the Louvre, in Germany, in Holland, and especially in Italy,
where he lived for many years. With tastes such as his came the habit,
or rather the fixed determination, never to paint or engrave any but
sacred subjects. Puffs and cliques are his abomination. His ideal is
the archaic rendered by modern methods. An artist of this type can but
obtain the half-grudging esteem of his own profession, and of the few
critics who really understand something about art. Gladly, and with
absolute disdain, he leaves to others the applause of the mob, the
gilded patronage of American purchasers, and the right to wear lace
cuffs. In short, in an age when the artist is often half a manufacturer
and half a charlatan, he is an artist only.

Now and then he is rich, but never for long. Half of his earnings goes
in alms; half into the pockets of his mendicant brethre