the
blast, we heard, low in the distance and indistinct, yet rising and
falling, and rising again in savage defiance and exultation, the death
chant that One-eyed Alexander the Bard had made on the death of
Stefan Stefanopoulos two hundred years ago. For a few minutes we sat
listening, and I do not think that any of us were very comfortable.
Then I rose to my feet, and I said:

"Hogvardt, old fellow, I fancy that scheme of yours must wait a
little. Unless I'm very much mistaken, we're going to have a lively
evening."

Well, and then we shook hands all round, and went in, and bolted the
door, and sat down to wait. We heard the death chant through the walls
now, for it was coming nearer.

(_To be continued._)

[Illustration]

[Illustration: A BROOK IN THE DEPARTMENT OF VAR, FRANCE. FROM A
PAINTING BY HENRI HARPIGNIES.

In the galleries of the Luxembourg, Paris. First exhibited at the
Salon of 1888.]

A CENTURY OF PAINTING.

NOTES DESCRIPTIVE AND CRITICAL.--COROT AND THE MODERN PASTORAL.--THE
MEN OF 1830.--ROUSSEAU, DIAZ, DUPRE, AND DAUBIGNY.--FOUR FIGURE
PAINTERS OF DIFFERING AIMS.

BY WILL H. LOW.

"Pictures?" boasted Turner. "Give me canvas, colors, a room to work
in, _with a door that will lock_, and it is not difficult to paint
pictures!" This was the spirit of the older men, against which
Constable rose in his might. It was the legacy of the past; the
principle, or the lack of it, which permitted Titian (in a picture now
in the National Gallery, London) to paint the shadows of his figures
falling away from the spectator into the picture, and _towards_ the
setting sun in the background. The return to nature, however, was not
accomplished at once. It is doubtful, indeed, if a painter can ever
arrive at a respectable technical achievement without imbibing certain
conventions which prevent complete submission to nature; absolute
_naivete_ thus becoming only theoretically possible. Constable, with
all his independence, dared not throw over all received canons of art.
And Gericault, while daring to paint a modern theme, daring still more
to embody it in forms plausibly like average humanity, and refusing to
place on a raft in mid-ocean a carefully chosen assortment of antique
statues, still did not think, apparently, that the heavily marked
shadows prevalent throughout his picture were never seen under the
far-reaching arch of the sky, but fell from a studio window. Nor do
the early pictures