rtless shepherds stand at a
fatal disadvantage in the world as compared with monks who could
illuminate with color as well as word)--the simple young soul is sent
for the exalting and finishing of its artistic faculties to Paris.

106. "Wherein," observers my prefatory author, "the romantic movement
was in the full tide of prosperity."

Hugo had written "Notre Dame," and Musset had published "Rolla" and the
"Nuits"; Balzac the "Lys dans la Vallee"; Gautier the "Comedie de la
Mort"; Georges Sand "Leone Leonie"; and a score of wild and eloquent
novels more; and under the instruction of these romantic authors, his
landlady, to whom he had intrusted the few francs he possessed, to dole
out to him as he needed, fell in love with him, and finding he could
not, or would not, respond to her advances, confiscated the whole
deposit, and left him penniless. The preface goes on to tell us how, not
feeling himself in harmony with these forms of Romanticism, he takes to
the study of the Infinite, and Michael Angelo; how he learned to paint
the Heroic Nude; how he mixed up for imitation the manners of Rubens,
Ribera, Mantegna, and Correggio; how he struggled all his life with
neglect, and endured with his family every agony of poverty; owed his
butcher and his grocer, was exposed to endless worry and annoyance from
writs and executions; and when first his grandmother died, and then his
mother, neither death-bed was able to raise the money that would have
carried him from Barbizon to Gruchy.

The work now laid before the public by the Fine Art Society is to be
considered, therefore--whatever its merits or defects may be--as an
expression of the influence of the Infinite and Michael Angelo on a mind
innocently prepared for their reception. And in another place I may take
occasion to point out the peculiar adaptability of modern etching to the
expression of the Infinite, by the multitude of scratches it can put on
a surface without representing anything in particular; and to
illustration of the majesty of Michael Angelo by preference of the backs
and legs of people to their faces.

107. But I refer to the book in this paper, partly indeed because my
mind is full of its sorrow, and I may not be able to find another
opportunity of saying so; but chiefly, because the author of the preface
has summed the principal authors of depraved Fiction in a single
sentence; and I want the reader to ask himself why, among all the forms
of the pictur