deal, as well as painted.  He did not concentrate his powers enough, perhaps, to make as signal and definite a mark as otherwise he might have done.  He is a shade desultory, and too spontaneous to be systematic.  One must be systematic to reach the highest point, even in the least material spheres.  But never have the grave and solemn aspects of landscape found a sweeter and serener spirit to interpret them.  In some of his pictures there is a truly religious feeling.  His frankness recalls Constable’s, but it is more distinguished in being more spiritual.  He has not Diaz’s elegance, nor Corot’s witchery, nor Rousseau’s power, but nature is more mysteriously, more mystically significant to him, and sets a deeper chord vibrating within him.  He is a sensitive instrument on which she plays, rather than a magician who wins her secrets, or an observer whose generalizing imagination she sets in motion.  The design of some of his important works, notably that of his last Salon picture, is very distinguished, and in one of his large canvases representing a road like that from Barbizon through the level plain to Chailly, there is the spirit and sentiment of all the summer evenings that ever were.  But he has distinctly less power than the strict Fontainebleau group.  He has, in force, less affinity with them than Troyon has, whose force is often magnificent, and whose landscape is so sweet, often, and often so strong as well, that one wonders a little at his fondness for cattle—­in spite of the way in which he justifies it by being the first of cattle painters.  And neither Daubigny nor Troyon, nor, indeed, Rousseau himself, often reaches in dramatic grandeur the lofty landscape of Michel, who, with Paul Huet (the latter in a more strictly historical sense) were so truly the forerunners and initiators of the romantic landscape movement, both in sentiment and chronology, in spite of their Dutch tradition, as to make the common ascription of its debt to Constable, whose aid was so cordially welcomed in the famous Salon of 1824, a little strained.

IV

But quite aside from the group of poetic painters which stamped its impress so deeply upon the romantic movement at the outset, that to this day it is Delacroix and Millet, Decamps and Corot whom we think of when we think of the movement itself, the classic tradition was preserved all through the period of greatest stress and least conformity by painters of great distinction, who, working under the romantic inspiration and more or less according to what may be called romantic methods, nevertheless possessed the classic temperament in so eminent a degree that to us their work seems hardly less academic than that of the Revolution and the Empire.  Not only Ingres, but Delaroche and Ary Scheffer, painted beside Gericault and Delacroix.  Ary Scheffer was an eloquent partisan of romanticism, yet his “Dante and Beatrice” and his “Temptation