et it. There are no signs of blood or
injury. Everybody seems to be getting along finely and to be having the
most invigorating physical exercise. Here and here, perhaps, the artist
depicts somebody jammed down under a beam or lying under the feet of a
horse; but if you look close you see that the beam isn't really pressing
on him, and that the horse is not really stepping on his stomach. In
fact the man is perfectly comfortable, and is, at the moment, taking
aim at somebody else with a two-string crossbow, which would have deadly
effect if he wasn't ass enough to aim right at the middle of a cowhide
shield.

You notice this quality more and more in the pictures as the history
moves on. After the invention of gunpowder, when the combatants didn't
have to be locked together, but could be separated by fields, and little
groves and quaint farm-houses, the battle seems to get quite lost in the
scenery. It spreads out into the landscape until it becomes one of the
prettiest, quietest scenes that heart could wish. I know nothing so
drowsily comfortable as the pictures in this gallery that show the
battles of the seventeenth century,--the Grand Monarch's own particular
epoch. This is a wide, rolling landscape with here and there little
clusters of soldiers to add a touch of colour to the foliage of the
woods; there are woolly little puffs of smoke rising in places to show
that the artillery is at its dreamy work on a hill side; near the
foreground is a small group of generals standing about a tree and
gazing through glasses at the dim purple of the background. There are
sheep and cattle grazing in all the unused parts of the battle, the
whole thing has a touch of quiet, rural feeling that goes right to the
heart. I have seen people from the ranching district of the Middle West
stand before these pictures in tears.

It is strange to compare this sort of thing with some of the modern
French pictures. There is realism enough and to spare in them. In the
Salon exhibition a year or two ago, for instance, there was one that
represented lions turned loose into an arena to eat up Christians. I can
imagine exactly how a Louis Quatorze artist would have dealt with the
subject,--an arena, prettily sanded, with here and there gooseberry
bushes and wild gilly flowers (not too wild, of course), lions with
flowing manes, in noble attitudes, about to roar,--tigers, finely
developed, about to spring,--Christians just going to pray,--and throu