rd of beauty or cleanliness. At the top of the
street, in a little three-roomed house, the painter and his wife
settled down quietly; and here they lived for twenty-seven years, long
after Millet's name had grown to be famous in the history of
contemporary French painting. An English critic, who visited the spot
in the days of Millet's greatest celebrity, was astonished to find the
painter, whom he had come to see, strolling about the village in rustic
clothes, and even wearing the sabots or wooden shoes which are in
France the social mark of the working classes, much as the smock-frock
used once to be in the remoter country districts of England. Perhaps
this was a little bit of affectation on Millet's part--a sort of proud
declaration of the fact that in spite of fame and honours he still
insisted upon counting himself a simple peasant; but if so, it was,
after all, a very pretty and harmless affectation indeed. Better to see
a man sticking pertinaciously to his wooden shoes, than turning his
back upon old friends and old associations in the days of his worldly
prosperity.

At Barbizon Millet's life moved on so quietly that there is nothing to
record in it almost, save a long list of pictures painted, and a
gradual growth, not in popularity (for THAT Millet never really
attained at all), but in the esteem of the best judges, which of course
brought with it at last, first ease, then comfort, and finally
comparative riches. Millet was able now to paint such subjects as
pleased him best, and he threw himself into his work with all the
fervour of his intensely earnest and poetical nature. Whatever might be
the subject which he undertook, he knew how to handle it so that it
became instinct with his own fine feeling for the life he saw around
him. In 1852 he painted his "Man spreading Manure." In itself, that
is not a very exalted or beautiful occupation; but what Millet saw in
it was the man, not the manure--the toiling, sorrowing, human
fellow-being, whose labour and whose spirit he knew so well how to
appreciate. And in this view of the subject he makes us all at once
sympathize. Other pictures of this period are such as "The Gleaners,"
"The Reapers," "A Peasant grafting a Tree," "The Potato Planters," and
so forth. These were very different subjects indeed from the dignified
kings and queens painted by Delaroche, or the fiery battle-pieces of
Delacroix but they touch a chord in our souls which those great
paint