itself, which is all profile.  Need we add that after the death of his father he soon wasted a fortune?  But the reckless bohemian in him was subjugated by necessity.  He set to work to earn his bread.  Some conception of his labours for thirty-five years may be gleaned from the catalogue of his work by Erastene Ramiro (whose real name is Eugene Rodrigues).  Nearly three thousand plates he etched, lithographed, or engraved, not including his paintings or his experiments in various mediums, such as vernis mou and wood-engraving.

The coarse legends of old Flanders found in Rops their pictorial interpreter.  Less cerebral in his abounding youth he made Paris laugh with his comical travesties of political persons, persons in high finance, and also by his shrewd eye for the homely traits in the life of the people.  His street scenes are miracles of detail, satire, and fun.  The one entitled Spring is the most noted.  That legacy of hate, inherited from the 1830 poets, of the bourgeois, was a merry play for Rops.  He is the third of the trinity of caricature artists, Daumier and Gavarni being the other two.  The liberal pinch of Gallic salt in the earlier plates need not annoy one.  Deliberately vulgar he never is, though he sports with things hallowed, and always goes out of his way to insult the religion he first professed.  There is in this Satanist a religious fond; the very fierceness of his attacks, of his blasphemies, betrays the Catholic at heart.  If he did not believe, why should he have displayed such continual scorn?  No, Rops was not as sincere as his friends would have us believe.  He made his Pegasus plod in too deep mud, and often in his most winged flights he darkened the blue with his satyr-like brutalities.  But in the gay middle period his pages overflow with decorative Cupids and tiny devils, joyful girls, dainty amourettes, and Parisian putti—­they blithely kick their legs over the edges of eternity, and smile as if life were a snowball jest or a game at forfeits.  They are adorable.  His women are usually strong-backed, robust Amazons, drawn with a swirling line and a Rubens-like fulness.  They are conquerors.  Before these majestic idols men prostrate themselves.

In his turbulent later visions there is no suspicion of the opium that gave its inspiration to Coleridge, Poe, De Quincey, James Thomson, or Baudelaire.  The city of dreadful night shown us by Rops is the city through whose streets he has passed his life long.  Not the dream cities of James Ensor or De Groux, the Paris of Rops is at once an abode of disillusionment, of mordant joys, of sheer ecstasy and morbid hallucinations.  The opium of Rops is his imagination, aided by a manual dexterity that is extraordinary.  He is a master of linear design.  He is cold, deadly cold, but correct ever.  Fabulous and absurd, delicious and abominable as he may be, his spirit sits critically aloft, never smiling.  Impersonal as a toxicologist, he handles his poisonous