ers fail to strike, and his treatment of them is always truthful,
tender, melancholy, and exquisite.

Bit by bit, French artistic opinion began to recognize the real
greatness of the retiring painter at Barbizon. He came to be looked
upon as a true artist, and his pictures sold every year for
increasingly large prices. Still, he had not been officially
recognized; and in France, where everything, even to art and the
theatre, is under governmental regulation, this want of official
countenance is always severely felt. At last, in 1867, Millet was
awarded the medal of the first class, and was appointed a Chevalier of
the Legion of Honour. The latter distinction carries with it the right
to wear that little tag of ribbon on the coat which all Frenchmen prize
so highly; for to be "decorated," as it is called, is in France a spur
to ambition of something the same sort as a knighthood or a peerage in
England, though of course it lies within the reach of a far greater
number of citizens. There is something to our ideas rather absurd in
the notion of bestowing such a tag of ribbon on a man of Millet's aims
and occupations; but all honours are honours just according to the
estimation of the man who receives them and the society in which he
lives; and Millet no doubt prized his admission to the Legion of Honour
all the more because it had been so long delayed and so little truckled
for.

To the end of his days, Millet never left his beloved Barbizon. He
stopped there, wandering about the fields, watching peasants at work,
imprinting their images firmly upon his eye and brain, and then going
home again to put the figures he had thus observed upon his vivid
canvas. For, strange to say, unlike almost every other great painter,
Millet never painted from a model. Instead of getting a man or woman
to sit for him in the pose he required, he would go out into the
meadows and look at the men and women at their actual daily
occupations; and so keen and acute was his power of observation, and so
retentive was his inner eye, that he could then recall almost every
detail of action or manner as clearly as if he had the original present
in his studio before him. As a rule, such a practice is not to be
recommended to any one who wishes to draw with even moderate accuracy;
constant study of the actual object, and frequent comparison by
glancing from object to copy, are absolutely necessary for forming a
correct draughtsman. But Millet kn