lues. Dramatic in
feeling and not without a note here and there of Rembrandt, this
particular composition fails, just fails to hit the bull's-eye.

After all, we must judge a man in his genre, as Keppel _pere_ puts it.
Maxime Lalanne's style is that of a vanished generation in etching. He
was a contemporary of Meryon, but that unhappy man of genius taught
him nothing. Born at Bordeaux in 1827, Lalanne died in 1886. He was a
pupil of Jean Gigoux (1806-94), a painter whose gossipy souvenirs
(1885) pleased Paris and still please the curious. (Gigoux it was who
remained in Balzac's house when the novelist died; though he was not
visiting the master of the house.) From this painter Lalanne evidently
imbibed certain theories of his art which he set forth in his Treatise
on Etching (1866).

Strangely enough, illustrator as he was, his transpositions into black
and white of subjects by Troyon, Ruysdael, Crome, Constable, and many
others are not so striking either in actual technique or individual
grasp as his original pieces. Constable, for instance, is thin,
diffuse, and without richness. Mezzotinted by the hands of such a man
as Lucas, we recognise the real medium for translating the English
painter. A master of the limpid line, Lalanne shows you a huddled bit
of Amsterdam or a distant view of Bordeaux, or that delicious prospect
taken on a spot somewhere below the Pont Saint-Michel, with the Pont
Neuf and the Louvre in the background. He had a feeling for those
formal gardens which have captured within their enclosure a moiety of
nature's unstudied ease. The plate called Aux Environs de Paris
reveals this. And what slightly melancholy tenderness there is in Le
Canal a Pont Sainte-Maxence. There are several states of the "Villers"
etching, an attractive land and seascape, marred, however, by the
clumsy sameness of the blacks in the foreground.

Without possessing Meryon's grim power in the presentation of old
Paris streets and tumble-down houses, Lalanne has achieved several
remarkable plates of this order. One is his well-known Rue des
Marmousets. This street is almost as repellent-looking as Rue
Mouffetard at its worst period. Ancient and sinister, its reputation
was not enticing. In it once dwelt a pastry cook who, taking his crony
the barber into his confidence, literally made mince-meat of a
stranger and sold the pies to the neighbours.

Messire Jacques du Breul, in his Le Theatre des Antiquites de Paris
(1612), rem