of living was not less surprising than his personal appearance.  He might be seen walking in the streets of Rome, tablets in hand, hitting off by a stroke or two of his pencil at one time the antique fragments he came upon, at another the gestures, the attitudes, the faces of the persons who presented themselves in his path.  Sometimes, in the morning, he would sit on the terrace of Trinity del Monte, beside another Frenchman five or six years younger, but already known for rendering landscapes with such fidelity, such, fresh and marvellous beauty, that all the Italian masters gave place to him, and that, after two centuries, he has not yet met his rival.”

[Illustration:  Lebrun——­674]

“Of these two artists, the older evidently exercised over the other the superiority which genius has over talent.  The smallest hints of Le Poussin were received by Claude Lorrain with deference and respect; and yet, to judge from the prices at which they severally sold their pictures, the landscape painter had for the time an indisputable superiority.”

Claude Gelee, called Lorrain, had fled when quite young from the shop of the confectioner with whom his parents had placed him.  He had found means of getting to Rome; there he worked, there he lived, and there he died, returning but once to France, in the height of his renown, for just a few months, without even enriching his own land with any great number of his works; nearly all, of them remained on foreign soil.  Le Poussin, born at the Andelys in 1593, made his way with great difficulty to Italy.  He was by that time thirty years old, and had no more desire than Claude to return to France, where painting was with difficulty beginning to obtain a standing.  His reputation, however, had penetrated thither.  King Louis XIII. was growing weary of Simon Vouet’s factitious lustre; he wanted Le Poussin to go to Paris.  The painter for a long while held out; the king insisted.  “I shall go,” said Le Poussin, “like one sentenced to be sawn in halves and severed in twain.”  He passed eighteen months in France, welcomed enthusiastically, lodged at the Tuileries, magnificently paid, but exposed to the jealousies of Simon Vouet and his pupils.  Worried, thwarted, frozen to death by the hoarfrosts of Paris, he took the road back to Rome in November, 1642, on the pretext of going to fetch his wife, and did not return any more.  He had left in France some of his masterpieces, models of that, new, independent, and conscientious art, faithfully studied from nature in all its Italian grandeur, and from the treasures of the antique.  “How did you arrive at such perfection?” people would ask Le Poussin.  “By neglecting nothing,” the painter would reply.  In the same way Newton was soon to discover the great laws of the physical world, by always thinking thereon.”

[Illustration:  Le Poussin and Claude Lorrain——­675]