ner, the sort of dinner a wealthy man can provide even in a country menaced with famine. The guests slid over their oysters into a trackless confusion of dishes and bottles so numerous that one could scarcely tell whether they were marching along side by side or one after the other. A good Chablis ministered gently to the first few convulsions of the conversation, and before the meat had been taken off every one was sailing his bark of persiflage merrily across the tops of the claret-glasses. The German captain stroked a bottle affectionately and decided outright it was a shame to make war upon a people who understood wine as did the French. The American delegate ventured a story, and those who could appreciate its flavor vowed they felt better for the laugh. The host permitted himself to recount an amusing incident at the expense of the local Kommandant, who was not of the number. Every one chortled. Then two lieutenants began to twit an American because his officer, another absentee, had fat legs. The German captain appealed jocularly to the mayor to aid him in restoring order.

By the time the second liqueur was being served the clustering cigar smoke had become tinged with a faint hue, color of rose. The occasion was patently developing. One of the Americans had already put on a German helmet, and discussion was rife as to whether, if he stood on his head, the spike would hold to the floor. A lieutenant was undertaking to sing a ribald English ditty. Internationalism, if not walking abroad, was at least sprawled in numerous easy-chairs.

And the German captain felt a whole troop of bubbles-mixed bubbles of champagne and sentimentality-effervescing inside him.

He leaned over to the mayor, and his argument seemed to be something in this vein:

"Monsieur le Maire, we 're enemies, you and I. Countries at war; no way out of that, you know. They say that down in the trenches you can sometimes hear the people at Paris cursing Germany. But

with us, between you and me, that does n't count so much, does it? For instance, if I should come back to see you after the war, you'd receive me just as now, would n't you?"

It had been a long, hard dinner. The claret had flown over the Chablis, and had in turn surrendered despairingly to the Burgundy and champagne. The liqueurs were cutting their own personal capers atop the whole fabric of vintages, and the mayor sensed a little tingling and itching along his veins. He had a feeling in his toes that the top of his head was going to fly off. He gazed at the German officer, inhaled a monster puff of cigar smoke, and hunched his head forward ever so slightly. A silence slipped through the door, over the servant's shoulder, and filtered through the room under cover of the smoke. And the mayor replied—

"What did the mayor reply?" urged my friend, sitting opposite me in the compartment..

I fixed my friend sternly.

"And the mayor replied, 'In the name of God, NEVER!'

"And he brought down his fist-it was a big French fist-with such a terrific thwack that the bottles leaped in astonishment, and the plates all clambered distractedly one over the other."

"And-" insisted my friend. The crazy little moonlight was sneaking through the window and twinkling mischievously on his gray mustache.

"And the German officer was so crestfallen that he rose right up and left. He took the train to Brussels, and did n't come back at all for at least three days."

Nothing was heard except the snicketysnack of the car-wheels wrangling interminably with the track.

"And," I continued-"and even now if you say 'Never!' suddenly to the captain, he cavorts and fidgets like a child when you shout 'Boo!' in the dark.”

"Oh, my dear old chap, really!" My friend's teeth gleamed all round his pipe

stem.

"Well, maybe I can't vouch for that. part," I had to admit grudgingly.

A

ND now to consider our reproductions, derived chiefly, as I have said, from the Heseltine collection and partly from others, both public and private; it will be convenient to take them in order of schools, beginning with the Italian, and going on with the German, Flemish, the Dutch, French, and English. Naturally, I have not attempted to illustrate any of the schools systematically or at large, but only to give examples of the work of a particular master or group of masters within each school as the materials might be most readily available.

Among the Italians our examples shall be drawn from two art centers only, Florence and Parma, and shall include none

of the primitives, properly so called, though nothing is more fascinating than their study. The earliest master to be represented will be Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and for him we must go outside the Heseltine collection. By date this mighty artist and sage belongs to the group of later Florentine primitives, Perugino, Botticelli, and the rest, but by genius and achievement to the full and free Renaissance. His hand-"that ineffable left hand," as a contemporary calls it, for it was with the left he chiefly worked-is distinguished above all others, whatever was the material he employed and for whatever purpose, for the combination of fiery energy with rhythmic charm of touch. The thousands of scien

most mystical whisperings of love both human and divine. We see already some dawn of this sentiment expressed in the beautiful, very early sheet of sketches for a smiling, girlish Madonna with a cat, where his pen wanders with an exquisite playfulness over the paper, trying to fix the lines of the design, whether from life or from memory (Fig. 1). This drawing comes from the British Museum, where there are several other trial sketches for the same engaging motive; so far as we know, none of them was carried out in painting. The intensity and brooding sweetness of the sentiment of mystical maternity inspires wholly, both in design and detail, the incomparable group, made about twenty years later by the same hand, but which I have chosen in order to illustrate the use of full-sized cartoons by Italian painters (Fig. 2). The cut shows only the upper half of the cartoon, thereby spoiling the composition, of course, but giving the quality

cartoon, which drew crowds to his studio in the Easter of that year, showed the Virgin still sitting on her mother's lap, but bending forward almost double to hold the infant Christ while he plays with a lamb on the ground beside her. This second cartoon is lost, but two early

of the heads better than could have been done on a more reduced scale. This cartoon was probably drawn at Milan about 1495. It shows no signs of ever having been actually pricked for transfer, and we know of no picture by the master, and of only one by a pupil (a Luini in the Borromeo collection), which closely follows it. We cannot guess what induced Leonardo to change this design when, in 1500, he had the commission for a picture of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne from the Servite monks for their Church of the Annunziata at Florence. The new

copies of it are preserved at Vienna and Turin, and the celebrated picture now at the Louvre was painted from it some years later in France by the master and his pupils, the original commission from the Servites having been canceled. Besides the two copies of the last cartoon, there exist two separate drawings of cartoon size for the head of the Virgin in this design. One, at Vienna, clearly belongs to the numerous class of full-sized copies made from Leonardo heads by pupils and followers, among them most frequently by Boltraffio. Another, formerly in the collection of the earls of Warwick, and now in that of Mrs. Ludwig Mond, is here reproduced as Fig. 3. This

is of far stronger quality than the Vienna example, and indeed it shows so much power of hand in the work of the hair and head-dress, and renders so subtly (far more subtly than the painting itself) the mother's smile of tender brooding and maternal ravishment, that it seems scarcely rash to accept the confident tradition that attributes it to the master himself.

The next Italian master represented is Fra Bartolommeo (1469-1517), who comes midway in date between Leonardo and Raphael, and whose mature largeness and freedom of design, tending already