such circumstances, not to be rendered, and that the effort could only
end in an ugly falsehood, he denies himself all aid from the features,
he feels that if he is to place himself or us in the midst of that
maddened multitude, there can be no time allowed for watching
expression. Still less does he depend on details of murder or
ghastliness of death; there is no blood, no stabbing or cutting, but
there is an awful substitute for these in the chiaroscuro. The scene
is the outer vestibule of a palace, the slippery marble floor is
fearfully barred across by sanguine shadows, so that our eyes seem to
become bloodshot and strained with strange horror and deadly vision; a
lake of life before them, like the burning seen of the doomed Moabite
on the water that came by the way of Edom: a huge flight of stairs,
without parapet, descends on the left; down this rush a crowd of women
mixed with the murderers; the child in the arms of one has been seized
by the limbs, _she hurls herself over the edge, and falls head
downmost, dragging the child out of the grasp by her weight_;--she
will be dashed dead in a second:--close to us is the great struggle; a
heap of the mothers, entangled in one mortal writhe with each other
and the swords; one of the murderers dashed down and crushed beneath
them, the sword of another caught by the blade and dragged at by a
woman's naked hand; the youngest and fairest of the women, her child
just torn away from a death grasp, and clasped to her breast with the
grip of a steel vice, falls backwards, helpless over the heap, right
on the sword points; all knit together and hurled down in one
hopeless, frenzied, furious abandonment of body and soul in the
effort to save. Far back, at the bottom of the stairs, there is
something in the shadow like a heap of clothes. It is a woman, sitting
quiet,--quite quiet,--still as any stone; she looks down steadfastly
on her dead child, laid along on the floor before her, and her hand is
pressed softly upon her brow."

I have nothing to add to the above description of this picture, except
that I believe there may have been some change in the color of the
shadow that crosses the pavement. The chequers of the pavements are,
in the light, golden white and pale grey; in the shadow, red and dark
grey, the white in the sunshine becoming red in the shadow. I formerly
suppos