literature. Unfortunately, he knew no English to speak of, and was
obliged to have recourse to translations. Walter Scott he thought
long-winded, and, after a few attempts at Shakespeare in French, he gave
it up. "Ca ne peut pas etre cela," he said. But he had several French
versions of "Gulliver's Travels," all of which he read in turn. One day,
I quoted to him a sentence from Carlyle's "Lectures on Heroes:" "Show me
how a man sings, and I will tell you how he will fight." "C'est cela,"
he said; "if Shakespeare had been a general, he would have won his
battles like Napoleon, by thunderclaps" (par des coups de foudre).

Delacroix had what a great many Frenchmen lack--a keen sense of humour,
but it was considerably tempered by what, for the want of a better term,
I may call the bump of reverence. He could not be humorous at the
expense of those he admired or respected, consequently his attempts at
caricature at the early period of his career in _Le Nain Jaune_ were a
failure; because Delacroix' admiration and respect were not necessarily
reserved for those with whom he agreed in art or politics, but for
everyone who attempted something great or useful, though he failed. The
man who, at the age of sixty, would enthusiastically dilate upon his
meeting forty years before with Gros, whose hat he had knocked off by
accident, was not the likely one to hold up to ridicule the celebrity of
the hour or day _without_ malice prepense. And this malice prepense
never uprose within him, except in the presence of some bumptious,
ignorant nobody. Then it positively boiled over, and he did not mind
what trick he played his interlocutor. The latter might be a wealthy
would-be patron, an influential Government official, or a well-known
picture-dealer; it was all the same to Delacroix, who had an utter
contempt for patronage, nepotism, and money. It was as good as a clever
scene in a comedy to see him rise and draw himself up to his full
height, in order to impress his victim with a sense of the importance of
what he was going to say. To get an idea of him under such
circumstances, one must go and see his portrait in the Louvre, painted
by himself, with the semi-supercilious, semi-benevolent smile playing
upon the parted lips, and showing the magnificent regular set of teeth,
of which he was very proud, beneath the black bushy moustache, which
reminds one curiously of that of Rembrandt. Of course, the victim was
mesmerized, and stood liste