king portraits; and the
whole scene is full of that sort of life and action which impresses one
at once as the very sort of action that must have taken place. Now it is
a battery of artillery backed against a wood,--now it is a plain over
which dense ranks of infantry march in succession to the front of the
fire. Here it is a scene where in the full sunlight shows the whole
details of the action; there it is night--and a night of cloud and
storm, draws her sombre veil over the dead and wounded covering the
field. A historian might find on these canvasses, far better than in
stores of manuscript, wherewith to fill many a page of history with
accurate and vivid details of these bloody days; or rather, many a page
of history would not present so accurate and vivid a conception of what
is a field of battle.

In 1822, entry to the exhibition at the Louvre being refused to his
works, Horace Vernet made an exhibition-room of his atelier, had a
catalogue made out (for what with battles, hunts, landscapes, portraits,
he had a numerous collection), and the public were admitted. In 1826 he
was admitted a Member of the Institute, and in 1830 was appointed
Director of the Academy at Rome, so that the young man who could not so
far decline his antiques as to treat the classic subject of the Royal
Academy, and thus gain the Academy at Rome, now went there as chief of
the school, and as one of the most distinguished artists of his time.
This residence for five years among the best works of the great masters
of Italy naturally inspired him with ideas and desires which it had not
been hitherto in his circumstances to gratify. And once installed in the
Villa Medici, which he made to resound with the voices of joy and
revelry, splendid fetes and balls, he set himself to study the Italian
school.

A series of pictures somewhat new in subject and manner of treatment was
the result of this change of circumstances and ideas. To the Paris
Exhibition of 1831 he sent a "Judith and Holofernes," which is one of
the least successful of his pictures in the Luxembourg, where it hangs
still, with another sent two years after, "Raffaelle and Michael Angelo
in the Vatican." This is perhaps the best of his works at the
Luxembourg, all being inferior; but it has a certain dry gaudiness of
color, and a want of seriousness of design, which render it unfit to be
considered a master-work. One unquestionably preferable, the "Arresting
of the Princes at the Pa