picture that deserves to be remembered.
Characteristically enough, this depicted _Cimabue finding Giotto in the
fields of Florence_. The shepherd boy is engaged in drawing the figure
of a lamb upon a smooth rock, using a piece of coal for pencil; an
admirable and precocious piece of work. At the time it was first shown
it was considered especially good in its harmonious and original
colouring, nor did a sight of it in 1896 at the Winter Exhibition of the
Royal Academy contradict the generous verdict of contemporary critics.
At Brussels he painted a portrait of himself, a notable thing of its
kind, wherein we see a slight, dark youth, with a face of much charm and
distinction, whose features one easily sees to be like those of later
portraits. Then, immediately before the return to Frankfort, and the
studying there, under Steinle, Leighton spent some months in Paris,
working in an atelier in the Rue Richer.

The conditions of this most informal of life-schools were such as Henri
Murger, who was alive and writing at the time, might have approved, but
were hardly to be called educative in any higher sense. The only master
that these Bohemians could boast was a very invertebrate old artist, who
seems to have been the soul of politeness and irresponsibility, and who
accompanied every weak criticism with the deprecatory conclusion, "Voila
mon opinion!"

"M. Voila mon opinion!" is a type not unknown otherwhere than in that
Paris atelier. A fine alterative the student must have found the severe
and stringent tonics that Steinle prescribed immediately afterwards in
Frankfort.

In the admirable monograph on "Sir Frederic Leighton" by Mrs. Andrew
Lang, from which we have drawn on occasion in these pages, an
interesting account is given of an exploit at Darmstadt, in which the
young artist took a chief part. An artists' festival was to be held
there, and Sir Frederic and one of his fellow-students, Signor Gamba,
took it into their heads to paint a picture for the occasion on the
walls of an old ruined castle near the town. The design was speedily
sketched after the most approved mediaeval fashion, and no time was lost
in executing the work. "The subject was a knight standing on the
threshold of the castle, welcoming the guests, while in the centre of
the picture was Spring, receiving the representatives of the three arts,
all of them caricatures of well-known figures. In one corner were the
two young artists themselves, surveyi