ew his own way best; and how
wonderfully minute and painstaking must his survey have been when it
enabled him to reproduce the picture of a person afterwards in every
detail of dress or movement.

He did not paint very fast. He preferred doing good work to much
work--an almost invariable trait of all the best workmen. During the
thirty-one years that he worked independently, he produced only eighty
pictures--not more, on an average, than two or three a year. Compared
with the rate at which most successful artists cover canvas to sell,
this was very slow. But then, Millet did not paint mainly to sell; he
painted to satisfy his own strict ideas of what constituted the highest
art. His pictures are usually very simple in their theme; take, for
example, his "Angelus," painted at the height of his fame, in 1867. A
man and a woman are working in the fields--two poor, simple-minded,
weather-beaten, devout French peasants. It is nightfall; the bell
called the "Angelus" rings out from the church steeple, and the two
poor souls, resting for a moment from their labours, devote a few
seconds to the silent prayers enjoined by their church. That is all;
and yet in that one picture the sorrows, the toils, and the
consolations of the needy French peasantry are summed up in a single
glimpse of a pair of working and praying partners.

Millet died somewhat suddenly in 1875. Strong and hearty as he was,
even the sturdy health of the Norman peasant had been undermined by the
long hardships of his early struggles, and his constitution gave way at
last with comparative rapidity. Still, he had lived long enough to see
his fame established, to enjoy ten years of ease and honour, and to
find his work cordially admired by all those for whose admiration he
could have cared to make an effort. After his death, the pictures and
unfinished sketches in his studio were sold for 321,000 francs, a
little less than 13,000 pounds. The peasant boy of Greville had at
last conquered all the difficulties which obstructed his path, and had
fought his own way to fame and dignity. And in so fighting, he had
steadily resisted the temptation to pander to the low and coarse taste
in art of the men by whom he was surrounded. In spite of cold, and
hunger, and poverty, he had gone on trying to put upon his canvas the
purer, truer, and higher ideas with which his own beautiful soul was
profoundly animated. In that endeavour he nobly succeeded. While too