of that kind are
capable of doing honour to the gifts and the sentiments of the
artist.[31] The _Girl bewailing her dead bird_ throws him into raptures.
"O, the pretty elegy!" he begins, "the charming poem! the lovely idyll!"
and so forth, until at length he breaks into a burst of lyric
condolence addressed to the weeping child, that would fill four or five
of these pages.[32]

[31] x. 143.

[32] x. 343.

No picture of the eighteenth century was greeted with more enthusiasm
than Greuze's _Accordee de Village_, which was exhibited in 1761. It
seems to tell a story, and therefore even to-day, in spite of its dulled
pink and lustreless blue, it arrests the visitor to one of the less
frequented halls of the Louvre.[33] Paris, weary of mythology and sated
with pretty indecencies, was fascinated by the simplicity of Greuze's
village tale. "_On se sent gagner d'une emotion douce en le regardant_,"
said Diderot, and this gentle emotion was dear to the cultivated classes
in France at that moment of the century. It was the year of the _New
Heloisa_.

[33] No. 260 of the French School.

The subject is of the simplest: a peasant paying the dower-money of his
daughter. "The father"--it is prudent of us to borrow Diderot's
description--"is seated in the great chair of the house. Before him his
son-in-law standing, and holding in his left hand the bag that contains
the money. The betrothed, standing also, with one arm gently passed
under the arm of her lover, the other grasped by her mother, who is
seated. Between the mother and the bride, a younger sister standing,
leaning on the bride and with an arm thrown round her shoulders. Behind
this group, a child standing on tiptoes to see what is going on. To the
extreme left in the background, and at a distance from the scene, two
women-servants who are looking on. To the right a cupboard with its
usual contents--all scrupulously clean.... A wooden staircase leading to
the upper floor. In the foreground near the feet of the mother, a hen
leading her young ones, to whom a little girl throws crumbs of bread; a
basin full of water, and on the edge of it, one of the small chickens
with its beak up in the air so as to let the water go down." Diderot
then proceeds to criticise the details, telling us the very words that
he hears the father addressing to the bridegroom, and as a touch of
observation of nature, that while one of the old man's hands, of which
we see the back, is