of the Eighteenth Century, and her two
only poets were two painters: Watteau and Fragonard.

Watteau, the man of the North, the child of Flanders, the great poet of
Love! the master of sweet serenity and tender Paradises, whose work may
be likened to the Elysian Field of Passion! Watteau, the melancholy
enchanter who has made nature sigh so heavily in his autumn woods, full
of regret around dreamful pleasure! Watteau, the Pensieroso of the
Regency; Fragonard, the little poet of the _Art of Love_ of the time.

Have you noticed in _L'Embarquement de Cythere_ all those naked little
forms of saucy and knavish Loves half lost in the heights of the sky?
Where are they going? They are going to play at Fragonard's and to
put on his palette the hues of their butterfly wings.

[Illustration: CORESUS AND CALLIRHOE.
_Fragonard_.]

Fragonard is the bold narrator, the gallant _amoroso_, the rogue with
Gallic malice, nearly Italian in genius but French in spirit; the man of
foreshortened mythology and roguish undress, of skies made rosy by the
flesh of goddesses and alcoves lighted with female nudity.

Upon a table beside a bunch of roses let us allow the leaves of his work
to be ruffled by the wind of a lovely day: from landscapes where robes
of satin are escaping in coquettish flight, our glance skips to meadows
guarded by Annettes of fifteen years, to granges where the somersaults
of love upset the painter's easel, to pastures where the milk-maid of
the milk-jug reveals her bare legs and weeps like a nymph over her
broken urn, for her sheep, her flocks, and her vanished dream. Upon
another page a maiden in love is writing a beloved name on the bark of a
tree on a lovely summer evening. The breeze is always turning them over:
now a shepherd and shepherdess are embracing before a sun-dial which
little Cupids make into a pleasure-dial. It keeps on turning them; and
now we have the beautiful dream of a pilgrim sleeping with his staff and
gourd beside him, and to whom appears a host of young fays skimming a
huge pot. Does it not seem that your eye is upon a vision of a fete by
Boucher, shown by his pupil in Tasso's garden? Adorable magic lantern!
where Clorinde follows Fiammette, where the gleams of an epic poem
mingle with the smiles of the _novellieri_! Tales of the fay Urgele,
little comic jests, rays of gayety and sunshine which one might say were
thrown upon the cloth upon which Beroalde de Verville made his
cherry-ga