lected together a crowd
of desperate and foolhardy young men, principally painters, provided
them with arms, and styled them "the death-company"; and, in verity,
this band spread abroad a full measure of the terror and alarm which
its name indicated. Those young men pervaded Naples, in troop form, all
day long, killing every Spaniard they came across. More than this, they
stormed their way into all the sacred places of sanctuary, and there,
without compunction, murdered their wretched enemies who had taken
refuge there, driven by fear of death. At night they betook themselves
to their chief, the mad, bloodthirsty Mas' Aniello, and they painted
pictures of him by torchlight, so that in a short time hundreds of
those pictures of him were spread about Naples and the surrounding
neighbourhood.

Now it was said that Salvator Rosa had been a member of this band,
robbing and murdering all day, but painting with equal assiduity all
night. What a celebrated art-critic--Taillasson, I think--said of our
master is true: "His works bear the impress of a wild haughtiness and
arrogance, of a bizarre energy, of the ideas and of their execution.
Nature displays herself to him not in the lovely peacefulness of green
meadows, flowery fields, perfumed groves, murmuring streams, but in the
awfulness of mighty up-towering cliffs, or sea-coasts, and wild,
inhospitable forests; the voice to which he listens is not the
whispering of the evening breeze, or the rustling of the leaves, but
the roar of the hurricane, the thunder of the cataract. When we look at
his deserts and the people of strange, wild appearance, who, sometimes
singly, sometimes in troops, prowl about them, the weirdest fancies
come to us of their own accord. Here there happened a terrible murder,
there the bleeding corpse was thrown hurriedly over the cliff, &c.,
&c."

Now this may all be the case, and although Taillasson may not be far
wrong when he says that Salvator's "Plato," and even his "St. John in
the Wilderness announcing the Birth of the Saviour," look just the
least little bit like brigands, still it is unfair to base any
conclusions drawn from the works upon the painter himself, and to
suppose that, though he represents the wild and the terrible in such
perfection, he must have been a wild and terrible person himself. He
who talks most of the sword often wields it the worst; he who so feels
in his heart the terror of bloody deeds that he is able to call them
into