d to the
studios of his artist-circle, kept him in touch with the world to
which he belonged. His books, too, were his unfailing companions,
though he never cared to stray far beyond the circle of his youthful
friendships, Homer, and Virgil, and especially the Bible, which he
looked upon as the book of painters, the inexhaustible source of the
noblest and most touching subjects, capable of expression in the
grandest forms.

But it was in the rural life about him, the life in which he actively
shared, that he found the world wherein he could pour all his
thoughts, feelings, and experiences with the certainty of seeing them
emerge in forms answering to his conception. It was not until he came
to Barbizon that he began truly to live the artist-life as he
understood it, where the work is a faithful reflection of the only
things a man really cares for--the things he knows by heart. In the
pictures painted at Barbizon, and in the multitude of slight sketches
for subjects never painted, with finished drawings and pastels, Millet
has composed a series of moral eclogues well worthy of a place with
those of Virgil and Theocritus. All the world knows them; all the
world loves them: the "Mother Feeding Her Children," "The Peasant
Grafting," "The First Step," "Going to Work," "The Sower," "The
Gleaners," "The Sheep-Shearing," "The Angelus"--even to name them
would carry us far beyond our limits. They made the fame of Millet
while he still lived, although the pecuniary reward of his labors was
not what they deserved nor what it would have been had he earlier
found his true way or had his life been prolonged to the normal limit.
He died in 1875 at the age of sixty-one. Since his death more than one
of his pictures has been sold at a price exceeding all that he earned
during his whole lifetime. Seen from the world's side, there was much
in his life that was sad and discouraging, but from the spiritual side
there was far more to cheer and uplift. His private life was honorable
and happy, his friends were many and among the chosen ones of the
time, and he had the happiness of seeing his work accepted and rated
at something like its true worth before he left it.

[Signature of the author.]

MEISSONIER[7]

[Footnote 7: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By CLARENCE COOK

(1813-1891)

[Illustration: Meissonier.]

Among the many beautiful paintings collected in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art of New York, there is