the name of the "Company of
Death." And in truth this band inspired all the fear and consternation
suggested by its terrible name. At all hours of the day they traversed
the streets of Naples in little companies, and cut down without mercy
every Spaniard whom they met. They did more--they forced their way into
the holy sanctuaries, and relentlessly murdered their unfortunate foes
whom terror had driven to seek refuge there. At night they gathered
round their chief, the bloody-minded madman Masaniello,[1.5] and
painted him by torchlight, so that in a short time there were hundreds
of these little pictures[1.6] circulating in Naples and the
neighbourhood.

This is the ferocious band of which Salvator Rosa was alleged to have
been a member, working hard at butchering his fellow-men by day, and by
night working just as hard at painting. The truth about him has however
been stated by a celebrated art-critic, Taillasson,[1.7] I believe. His
works are characterised by defiant originality, and by fantastic energy
both of conception and of execution. He delighted to study Nature, not
in the lovely attractiveness of green meadows, flourishing fields,
sweet-smelling groves, murmuring springs, but in the sublime as seen in
towering masses of rock, in the wild sea-shore, in savage inhospitable
forests; and the voices that he loved to hear were not the whisperings
of the evening breeze or the musical rustle of leaves, but the roaring
of the hurricane and the thunder of the cataract. To one viewing his
desolate landscapes, with the strange savage figures stealthily moving
about in them, here singly, there in troops, the uncomfortable thoughts
arise unbidden, "Here's where a fearful murder took place, there's
where the bloody corpse was hurled into the ravine," etc.

Admitting all this, and even that Taillasson is further right when he
maintains that Salvator's "Plato," nay, that even his "Holy St. John
proclaiming the Advent of the Saviour in the Wilderness," look just a
little like highway robbers--admitting this, I say, it is nevertheless
unjust to argue from the character of the works to the character of the
artist himself, and to assume that he, who represents with lifelike
fidelity what is savage and terrible, must himself have been a savage,
terrible man. He who prates most about the sword is often he who wields
it the worst; he who feels in the depths of his soul all the horrors of
a bloody deed, so that, taking the palette o