use it costs them so little effort to
understand the language and to speak it for their own use that they
stop there, as we often do with French, which we speak at ten years of
age and have forgotten at forty.

Now it is time to go and visit the art gallery, which is the greatest
ornament of the Hague.

On entering we find ourselves at once before the most celebrated of
all painted animals, Paul Potter's "Bull"--that immortal bull which,
as has been said, was honored at the Louvre, when the mania arose of
classifying these pictures in a sort of hierarchy of celebrity, by
being placed near the "Transfiguration" of Raphael, the "St Peter the
Martyr" of Titian, and the "Communion of St. Jerome" by Domenichino;
that bull for which England would pay a million francs, and Holland
would not sell for double that sum; the bull on which more pages have
been written than the strokes of the artist on the canvas, and about
which critics still write and dispute as if it were a real living
creation of a new animal instead of a picture.

The subject of the picture is very simple--a life-size bull, standing
with his head turned toward the spectator, a cow lying on the ground,
some sheep, a shepherd, and a distant landscape.

[Illustration: Paul Potter's Bull.]

The supreme merit of this bull may be expressed in one word: it is
alive. The serious wondering eye, which gives the impression of
vigorous vitality and savage pride, is painted with such truth that at
the first sight one feels inclined to dodge to the right or left, as
one does in a country road when one meets such animals. His moist
black nostrils seem to be smoking, and to be drawing in the air with a
prolonged breath. His hide is painted with all its folds and
wrinkles; one can see where the animal has rubbed himself against the
trees and the ground; the hairs look as though they are stuck on the
canvas. The other animals are equally fine: the head of the cow, the
fleece of the sheep, the flies, the grass, the leaves and fibres of
the plants, the moss,--everything is rendered with extraordinary
fidelity. Although the infinite care the artist must have taken is
apparent, the fatigue and patience of the copy do not appear; it seems
almost an inspired, impetuous work, in which the painter, impelled by
a thirst for truth, has not felt a moment of hesitation or weariness.
Infinite criticisms were made on this "incredible stroke of audacity
by a young man of twenty-four." The