aps, owing to many peculiarities of his
nature, showing themselves in unsympathetic forms in his pictures, he
may always fall short of complete appreciation by the educated taste
even,--and, indeed, to me he seems, of all the great colorists, the one
least likely ever to win general favor, but not from want of greatness.

I have often heard his drawing spoken of as bad. It was not the drawing
of a _dessinateur_, but there was method in its badness. I remember
hearing a friend say, that, going into his studio one day, he found him
just in the act of finishing a hand. He said, "It looks very badly
drawn, but I have painted it three times before I could get it right
Once I had it well drawn, and then it looked very badly; and now it
suits me better than when it was well drawn." A neatly drawn figure
would have made as bad an appearance in one of his pictures as a dandy
in the heat and turmoil of a battle-field; yet, as they came, all the
parts were consistent with the whole, reminding one of what Ruskin says
of Turner's figures.

For vigor and dash in execution, and the trooping energy of some of his
competitions, he reminds me more of Rubens than of any other; but his
composition has a more purely imaginative cast than that of Rubens, a
purer melody, a far more refined spiritualism. Nothing was coarse or
gross, much less sensual. His was the true imaginative fusion from which
pictures spring complete, subject to no revision. Between him and Turner
there were many points of resemblance, of which the greatest was in a
common defect,--an impulsive, unschooled, unsubstantial method of
execution, contrasting strongly with the exact, deliberate, and yet,
beyond description, masterly touch of Titian and most of his school.
Tintoret alone shows something of the same tendency,--attributable, no
doubt, to the late time at which he came into the method of his master.
If Delacroix has none of the great serenity and cheerfulness of Titian,
or the large and manly way of seeing of Veronese, he has an imaginative
fervor and intensity we do not see in them, and of which Tintoret and
Tiepolo only among the Venetians show any trace. Generations hence,
Eugene Delacroix will loom larger above his contemporaries, now hiding
him by proximity.

* * * * *

SYMPATHETIC LYING.

If "all men are liars," and everybody deceives us a little sometimes, so
that David's _dictum_ hardly needs his apology of _haste_, it