s--parceque ils ne peuvent pas etre
autre chose. Il fallait un homme de genie pour sortir d'un pareil
bourbier et malheureusement je n'ai que du talent." By the "bourbier" he
meant his great-grandfather, his two grandfathers, and his father, all
of whom were painters and draughtsmen.

Posterity will probably decide whether Horace Vernet was a genius or
merely a painter of great talent, but it will scarcely convey an
approximate idea of the charm of the man himself. There was only one
other of his contemporaries who exercised the same spell on his
companions--Alexandre Dumas _pere_. Though Vernet was a comparative
dwarf by the side of Dumas, the men had the same qualities, physical,
moral, and mental. Neither of them knew what bodily fatigue meant; both
could work for fourteen or fifteen hours a day for a fortnight or a
month; both would often have "a long bout of idleness," as they called
it, which, to others not endowed with their strength and mental
activity, would have meant hard labour. Both were fond of earning money,
fonder still of spending it; both created almost without an effort.
Dumas roared with laughter while writing; Vernet sang at the top of his
voice while painting, or bandied jokes with his visitors, who might come
and go as they liked at all hours. Dumas, especially in the earlier days
of his career, had to read a great deal before he could catch the local
colour of his novels and plays--he himself has told us that he was
altogether ignorant of the history of France. But when he had finished
reading up the period in question, he wrote as if he had been born in
it. Vernet was a walking cyclopaedia on military costume; he knew,
perhaps, not much more than that, but that he knew thoroughly, and never
had to think twice about the uniforms of his models, and, as he himself
said, "I never studied the thing, nor did I learn to paint or to draw.
According to many people, I do not know how to paint or to draw now: it
may be so; at any rate I have the comfort of having wasted nobody's time
in trying to learn."

Like Dumas, he was very proud of his calling and of the name he had made
for himself in it, which he would not have changed for the title of
emperor--least of all for that of king; for, like his great
contemporary, he was a republican at heart. It did not diminish either
his or Dumas' admiration for Napoleon I. "I can understand an absolute
monarchy, nay, a downright autocracy, and I can understand a rep