him serious, and laughed at him; whereupon he called to four of his men to come and stick me up against the church wall, and then constitute themselves a firing-party. They had duly posted me, and were proceeding to carry out the program, when suddenly a rush of Versaillists came upon and over the Rue St. Lazare barricade, whereupon the defenders precipitately evacuated the triangle, the firing-party accompanying their comrades. I remained, not caring for the society I should accompany if I fled; but I presently came to regard my fastidiousness as folly. For several shots from Versaillist rifles came too near to be pleasant, and in a twinkling I was in Versaillist grips, and instantly charged with being a Communard. The people in the red breeches set about sticking me up against the church wall again, when fortunately I saw a superior officer, and appealed to him. I was bidden to hold up my hands. They were not particularly clean, but there were no gunpowder stains on the thumb and forefinger. Those stains were, it seemed, the brand marking the militant Communard, and my freedom from them just pulled me through. It was a "close call," but then a miss is as good as a mile.

Late in the afternoon the drift of the retreating Communists seemed to be in the direction of Montmartre, whence their guns were firing over the city at the Versaillist artillery, now on the Trocadéro. The Versaillists, for their

part, were also moving deliberately in the Montmartre direction, and before dusk had reached the Place de l'Europe at the back of the St. Lazare terminus. From this point on the north they held with their advanced forces a definite line down the Rue Tronchet to the Madeleine. They were maintaining their fire along the Boulevard Haussmann, and from their battery at the Madeleine they had shattered the Communist barricade on the Boulevard des Capucines at the head of the Rue de la Paix. The Communists were undoubtedly partly demoralized, yet they were working hard everywhere at the construction of barricades.

About 8 P. M. the firing died out everywhere, and for an interval there was a dead calm. What strange people were those Parisians! It was a lovely evening, and the scene in the narrow streets off the Rue Lafayette reminded me of the aspect of the down-town residential streets of New York on a summer Sunday evening. Men and women were placidly sitting by their street doors, gossiping easily about the events and the rumors of the day. The children played around the barricades; their mothers scarcely looked up at the far-off sound of the générale, or when the distant report of the bursting of a shell came on the soft night wind. Yet on that light wind was borne the smell of blood, and corpses were littering the pavements not three hundred yards away.

Archibald Forbes.

HEY play whist, the beaus in their powdered wigs and velvet coats, the ladies in their brocade petticoatsand fine stomachers. The west windows are open; a fountain plashes in the garden; the flower-beds are bordered with box, and the scent of the box comes in at the open windows.

They play whist. A beau shakes back the lace frill from his hand as he deals. A red jewel gleams on his finger. The ladies' brocades rustle; they frown softly at their cards. An hour-glass stands on a table inlaid with mother

VOL. XLIV.-107-108.

of-pearl; the sand in the hour-glass fiows silently; the pungent smell of the box comes in at the open windows.

They play whist. A lady leads from her long suit; a beau takes the trick with a king. His black eyes flash under his white wig like eternal youth.

The fountain plashes in the garden; the pungent smell of the box comes in at the open windows; the sand in the hour-glass flows as silently as the lives of the players.

They play whist. A beau leads an ace; his partner trumps. A trick is lost, but he looks at her, and smiles. A trick is lost- but love is immortal.

Mary E. Wilkins.

seen through the window is like Cima in drawing, and like the Lombards in its bluegreen coloring. These influences showing in his work were mingled with technical methods peculiar to himself. Thus he had his own method of handling light and shade, his own color delicacy, and, what is more apparent in this portrait, certain mannerisms in drawing. The theory of the late Senator Morelli, that the old Italians had a way of painting conventional features, has been sneered at by his critics, but nevertheless there is some truth in it, if not enough to establish a science. Lotto, for example, was very fond of giving his portraits a peculiar twist of the head, and a sidelong look from the eye; his ears were almost always heavy, long, and inclined toward a point, not at the top but at the bottom; his hands and fingers were never quite free from a cramped appearance; and the finger-tips were inclined toward a point with a very singular form of finger-nail. Portraiture in those days did not extend to the minute realization of every individual feature. The examination of a man's work - Bellini's or Titian's, for instance-shows that he used but one formula for all hands and ears. Just so with Lotto. This portrait, compared with those in the Brera (especially the "Portrait of a Lady with a Fan," No. 253), those in the National Gallery in London, or even the sadly repainted Giorgionesque "Three Ages" in the Pitti (engraved in this magazine for April, 1892), will reveal the peculiar methods of the one man.

Those who do not care for the technical analysis of a picture, but prefer to judge by the spirit in which it is conceived and executed, may trace the identity of Lotto in that way quite as well. For, in spite of his eclecticism, Lotto had an individuality of his own, showing in a loftiness of type, an aristocratic grace of countenance, a refinement of feeling, and all through both conception and method a certain nervous quality that is almost morbid in its sensitiveness. Certainly our portrait shows these qualities, and, applying either method of recognition, the microscope of Morelli or the broader intuitive sense of Mündler or Cavalcaselle, there is only one conclusion that can be reached about it. It is a work of Lorenzo Lotto, and though it has suffered somewhat from the effects of time and repainting, it still possesses not a little of nobility. Whether it is a Columbus or not, is quite another matter. Perhaps if the reasons for thinking so are set forth, the public will be as capable a judge as the Columbus experts.

1 Critical articles upon this portrait appeared in "La Tribuna Illustra," Rome, December 7, 1890, and in the "Rivista Marittima," July and August, 1890. W. J. Stillman wrote of it as a Lotto in the "Nation,"

Of the many representations of Columbus every portrait with a ruff or a beard is excluded. Neither was worn in Columbus's time. Criticism accepts as possibilities two types of the discoverer. One is the Giovian type, best seen perhaps in the D'Orchi portrait at Como or the Yanez portrait at Madrid. The history of the supposed original is brief and uncertain. Sixty years or more after the death of Columbus, Vasari gave a list of two hundred and eighty portraits in the villa of Paolo Giovio on Lake Como, which Duke Cosimo had Cristoforo dell' Altissimo copy for his Gardaroba. In the list, with Attila, Artaxerxes, Saladin, Tamerlane, and other celebrities, whose portraits must have been purely imaginary, appears "Colombo Genovese." In 1575, engravings purporting to reproduce the portraits in the Como villa were printed, and among them one that still does service for Christopher Columbus. If the real portrait of the discoverer ever was in that collection, it must have been lost or confused with others. The Giovian type shows the face and costume of a Franciscan brother instead of a navigator. For that reason, and because it does not correspond to the written descriptions left by the contemporaries of Columbus, it has not been universally accepted.

The other type is well shown in the Ministry of Marine portrait at Madrid.2 The Lotto portrait, which we have before us, is an earlier presentation of this type-perhaps the archetype. The difference between the two men shown in the two portraits is slight indeed. It might result from two different artists viewing the same sitter, or the sitter himself seen at two different times or ages, or from the careless restorations from which both pictures have suffered. We see such variations in the portraits of Francis I., and Napoleon I., and even in those of George Washington. This type seems to repeat itself in succeeding engravings and ideal portraits; something of it shows in the Genoa statue; so familiar is it that painters at this day employ it in historical pictures of Columbus; and even the circus people use it in their show-bills. Whether real or imaginary, it seems to be the popular conception of what the discoverer ought to be. Unfortunately there is no absolute Columbus criterion by which we may judge whether it is fact or fiction, but there are reasons for thinking it founded on fact.

It is, in the first place, the Ligurian type, the Genoese type, which the contemporaries and followers of Columbus-his son Ferdinand, Trevisan, Las Casas, Oviedo, Benzoni

December 26, 1889, and I am informed that Cavalcaselle, Morelli, Böde, and a number of German experts have given a like opinion.

2 Engraved in this magazine for May, 1892.

- described in saying that the admiral was tall, well formed, above the average height; his face was long, neither full nor thin, his cheek-bones a little high. He had an aquiline nose, light (gray) eyes, and a fair, high-colored complexion. When a young man his hair was blond, but at the age of thirty it became gray. Las Casas adds that "he had an air of authority," and Benzoni that "his appearance was that of a nobleman." Such a general description is, of course, a rather loose mask into which many faces may be thrust; but the one that fits it best is the Ligurian face. A comparison, feature by feature, will show that the Lotto portrait tallies exactly with the description even in the matter of the gray hair, the gray eyes, the "air of authority," and "the appearance of a nobleman." If the original study for the portrait were made in 1501, as is thought probable, it should find Columbus (according to Harrisse) fifty-six years of age, out of favor with the court, suffering from hardships and misfortunes, and disheartened by ingratitude. Again, the picture corresponds, even in the facial expression of sadness and wounded pride.

The costume in which the figure is clothed has more importance, perhaps, than would ordinarily attach, for the reason that the old Venetians never searched the history of antiquity for appropriate "historical" garments. They always painted what they saw about them, and here in this portrait we have the Italian costume of the Columbus age. It is the first time that it appears in any portrait of the discoverer; and the second and only other time it appears is in the repetition, the Ministry of Marine portrait. Carderera, in his "Informe sobre los Retratos de Cristobal Colon," says of the costume of the Columbus period, that for the better classes"the hair was as long as to cover the ears, and cut in a horizontal line; the shirts had thin folds, and a collar which was no higher than a finger is thick; the coat was long to the knees, and the collar was cut out square around the neck, or the breast was cut out square. .. Mantles were long, and fell to the ankles, with broad lapels, and had slits or openings at the sides." Had he added that the lapels were of silk or of fur, it would seem as though his description had been taken directly from the Lotto portrait, for it fits it in every respect. It is, in brief, the Italian costume in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries for wellto-do or noble people, and may be seen at this day in the Venetian pictures by Bellini, Carpaccio, Cima, and their contemporaries.

But to come a little nearer to our search, this Genoese, with "an air of authority" and a tinge of melancholy about him, who looks out of his canvas with such a reproachful, half-disdainful

look-this man is a navigator, a commander. The lines of the face are those formed by exposure to all sorts of weather; the bronzed, tanned look of the skin is the result of salt air and southern sun; the very eyes, with their keen, narrow look, are those of a "lookout" at sea who blinks in the fierce light of noonday beating on the ocean. But, above all, if he be not a navigator, why the attributes of the craft about him? In the left hand he holds a logglass. It is not an hour-glass, but a log-glass, which runs from fourteen to twenty-eight seconds, and was used in connection with the log-line to ascertain the speed of a ship. It rests upon a book, and that book is marked on the back "Aristotel." Aristotle and Strabo both taught the spherical theory of the earth. It was the influence of Aristotle and his interpreters that kept alive during the middle ages the doctrine that India and Spain were not far apart; and Mr. Tillinghast informs us (Winsor, Vol. I, p. 36) that Columbus certainly knew of these sources. Whether he did or did not would have made little difference to the painter. He had to portray a believer in the roundness of the earth. Aristotle was an ancient authority for that belief; hence his volume was an appropriate symbol-particularly appropriate for the man who first put the spherical theory to a practical test. Another symbol, that of the Indian in the red cap at the right, was unfortunately cut away, and cannot be spoken of now. There was probably some confusion in the painter's mind between the Indian brought to Venice by Cappello as a present to the Seigniory in 1497 and the Moors of western Africa. The error of thinking them of kin was popular at that time; hence the red fez, which might, indeed, have been worn by Cappello's Indian while in Venice.

If there is any possible doubt about the book, the log-glass, and the Indian symbols, there is none whatever about the attribute in the right hand. It is a map-a map not of Africa or India, but of the New World, the West Indies discovered by Columbus. What possible pertinence could there be in placing this map of Columbus's discoveries in the hands of another person than Columbus himself? He holds the map half unrolled to the view as an evidence of his achievement; in the hands of any other person, say Vasco da Gama, Magellan, or Vespucci, it would look like downright theft or false pretenses. During the life of Columbus, and for many years after his death, no navigator would have dared to appropriate to himself such a symbol. The discovery of the West Indies was the peculiar glory of Columbus, and even modern historical criticism, which has pilfered from him everything else, including ability, honor, and common decency, has