the last word has not yet been
said concerning him. He combines Roman outline with Venetian color; but
love is fatal to his work, love not merely transfixes his heart, but
sends his arrow through the brain, deranges the course of his life, and
sets the victim describing the strangest zigzags. If the mistress of the
moment is too kind or too cruel, Joseph will send into the Exhibition
sketches where the drawing is clogged with color, or pictures finished
under the stress of some imaginary woe, in which he gave his whole
attention to the drawing, and left the color to take care of itself. He
is a constant disappointment to his friends and the public; yet Hoffmann
would have worshiped him for his daring experiments in the realms of
art. When Bridau is wholly himself he is admirable, and as praise is
sweet to him, his disgust is great when one praises the failures in
which he alone discovers all that is lacking in the eyes of the public.
He is whimsical to the last degree. His friends have seen him destroy
a finished picture because, in his eyes, it looked too smooth. "It is
overdone," he would say; "it is niggling work."

With his eccentric, yet lofty nature, with a nervous organization and
all that it entails of torment and delight, the craving for perfection
becomes morbid. Intellectually he is akin to Sterne, though he is not a
literary worker. There is an indescribable piquancy about his epigrams
and sallies of thought. He is eloquent, he knows how to love, but the
uncertainty that appears in his execution is a part of the very nature
of the man. The brotherhood loved him for the very qualities which the
philistine would style defects.

Last among the living comes Fulgence Ridal. No writer of our times
possesses more of the exuberant spirit of pure comedy than this poet,
careless of fame, who will fling his more commonplace productions to
theatrical managers, and keep the most charming scenes in the seraglio
of his brain for himself and his friends. Of the public he asks just
sufficient to secure his independence, and then declines to do
anything more. Indolent and prolific as Rossini, compelled, like
great poet-comedians, like Moliere and Rabelais, to see both sides of
everything, and all that is to be said both for and against, he is
a sceptic, ready to laugh at all things. Fulgence Ridal is a great
practical philosopher. His worldly wisdom, his genius for observation,
his contempt for fame ("fuss," as he calls it)