immer of white feet. This picture, however, has not the intense pathos
and tragedy of the Beguiling of Merlin, nor the mystical and lovely
symbolism of the Days of the Creation. Above these three pictures are
hung five allegorical studies of figures by the same artist, all worthy
of his fame.

Mr. Walter Crane, who has illustrated so many fairy tales for children,
sends an ambitious work called the Renaissance of Venus, which in the
dull colour of its 'sunless dawn,' and in its general want of all the
glow and beauty and passion that one associates with this scene reminds
one of Botticelli's picture of the same subject. After Mr. Swinburne's
superb description of the sea-birth of the goddess in his Hymn to
Proserpine, it is very strange to find a cultured artist of feeling
producing such a vapid Venus as this. The best thing in it is the
painting of an apple tree: the time of year is spring, and the leaves
have not yet come, but the tree is laden with pink and white blossoms,
which stand out in beautiful relief against the pale blue of the sky, and
are very true to nature.

M. Alphonse Legros sends nine pictures, and there is a natural curiosity
to see the work of a gentleman who holds at Cambridge the same
professorship as Mr. Ruskin does at Oxford. Four of these are studies of
men's heads, done in two hours each for his pupils at the Slade Schools.
There is a good deal of vigorous, rough execution about them, and they
are marvels of rapid work. His portrait of Mr. Carlyle is
unsatisfactory; and even in No. 79, a picture of two scarlet-robed
bishops, surrounded by Spanish monks, his colour is very thin and meagre.
A good bit of painting is of some metal pots in a picture called Le
Chaudronnier.

Mr. Leslie, unfortunately, is represented only by one small work, called
Palm-blossom. It is a picture of a perfectly lovely child that reminds
one of Sir Joshua's cherubs in the National Gallery, with a mouth like
two petals of a rose; the under-lip, as Rossetti says quaintly somewhere,
'sucked in, as if it strove to kiss itself.'

Then we come to the most abused pictures in the whole Exhibition--the
'colour symphonies' of the 'Great Dark Master,' Mr. Whistler, who
deserves the name of '[Greek] as much as Heraclitus ever did. Their
titles do not convey much information. No. 4 is called Nocturne in Black
and Gold, No. 6A Nocturne in Blue and Silver, and so on. The first of
these represents a rocket of golden rain,