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argumentative staccato, and in high them at all, were the three most utterly passages you could see his wisdom unsubdued things that he embodied_ teeth. Between stanzas he spoke stim- will, pride, appetite. The word she ulating exhortations: "Louder, breth- vainly longed for was coveted for one ren and sisters, louder; the fate of whose tardy footfall her waiting ear immortal souls may be a-hangin' on the caught the moment it sounded at the amount of noise you make." And the door, and before the turning of a huntide of melody rose higher. dred eyes told her John March had come and was sitting in the third seat behind her.

As hymn followed hymn the church filled. All sorts-black or yellow being no sort—all sorts came; the town's best and worst, the country's proudest and forlornest; the sipper of wine, the dipper of snuff; acrid pietist, flagrant reprobate, and many a true Christian whose God-forgiven sins, if known to men, neither church nor world could have pardoned; many a soul that under the disguise of flippant smiles or superior frowns, staggered in its darkness or shivered in its cold, trembled under visions of death and judgment or yearned for one right word of guidance or extrication; and many a heart that openly or secretly bled for some other heart's reclaim. And so the numbers grew and the waves of song swelled. The adagios and largos of ancient psalmody were engulfed and the modern "hyme toons," as the mountain people called them, were so "peert an' devilish" that the most heedless grew attentive, and lovers of raw peanuts, and even devotees of tobacco, emptied their mouths of these and filled them with praise.

Garnet had never preached more effectively. For the first time in Barbara's experience he seemed to her to feel, himself, genuinely and deeply the things he said. His text was, "Be sure your sin will find you out." Men marvelled at the life-likeness with which he pictured the torments of a soul torn by hidden and cherished sin. So wonderful, they murmured, are the pure intuitions of oratorical genius! Yet Barbara was longing for a widely different word.

Not for herself. It was not possible that she should ever tremble at any pulpit reasoning of temperance and judgment from the lips of her father. Three things in every soul, he cried, must either be subdued in this life or be forever ground to powder in a fiery hereafter; and these three, if she knew

In the course of her father's sermon there was no lack of resonant Amens and soft groanings and moanings of ecstasy. But Suez was neither Wildcat Ridge nor Chalybeate Springs, and the tempering chill of plastered ceiling and social inequalities stayed the wild unrestraint of those who would have held free rule in the log church or under the camp-meeting bower. The academic elegance of the speaker's periods sobered the ardor which his own inspired, and as he closed there rested on the assemblage a silence and an awe as though Sinai smoked but could not thunder.

Barbara hoped against hope. At every enumeration of will, pride, and appetite she saw the Pastor's gaze rest pleadingly on her, and in the stillness of her inmost heart she confessed the evil presence of that unregenerate trinity. Yet when he rose to bid all mourners for sin come forward while the next hymn was being sung, she only mourned that she could not go, and tried in vain not to feel, as in every drop of her blood she still felt, there behind her, that human presence so different from all others on earth. "This call," she secretly cried, "this hour, are not for me. Father in heaven! if only they might be for him."

Before the rising precentor could give out his hymn number Uncle Jimmie Rankin had sprung to his feet and started "Rock of Ages" in one of the wildest minors of the early pioneers. At once the strain was taken up on every side, the notes swelled, Uncle Jimmie clapped hands in time, and at the third line a mountain woman in the gallery, sitting with her sun-bonnet pulled down over her sore eyes, changed a snuff-stick from her mouth to her pocket, burst into a heart-freezing scream, and began to thrash about in her seat.

The hymn rolled on in stronger volume. The Yankee precentor caught the tune and tried to lead, but Uncle Jimmie's voice soared over him with the rapture of a lark and the shriek of an eagle, two or three more pairs of hands clapped time, the other Suez pastor took a trochee, and the four preachers filed down from the high pulpit, singing as they came. Garnet began to pace to and fro in front of it and to exhort in the midst of the singing.

"Who is on the Lord's side?" he loudly demanded.

seats behind that fair girl whose face has sunk into her hands, sits, with every eye on them, the wan missionary from China, pleading with John March.

Parson Tombs saw the chance for a better turn of affairs. "Brethren," he cried, kneeling as he spoke, "let us pray! And as our prayers ascend if any sinner feels the dew o' grace fall into his soul, let him come forward and kneel with the Lord's ministers. Brother Samuel Messenger, lead us in prayer!"

As the whole house turned and sank to its knees, Fannie whispered, "Isn't

"Should my tears forever flow," sang this all wretched?" the standing throng.

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"O! my brother, two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken and the other left; which one will you be? Come, my weary sister; come, my sinladen brother. O, come unto the marriage! Now is the accepted time! The clock of God's patience has run down and is standing at Now! Sing the last verse again, Uncle Jimmie! This night thy soul may be required of thee! Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, the other left. O, my sweet sister, come! be the taken one! flee as a bird! The angel is troubling the pool; who will first come to the waters? O, my unknown, yet beloved brother, whoever you are, don't you know that whosoever comes first to-night will lead a hundred others and will win a crown with that many stars? Come, brethren, sisters, we're losing priceless moments!" Why does no one move? Because just in the middle of the house, three

"O," moaned Barbara, "I'm so wretched myself I can't tell."

"Go up, then! If you go I believe he'll follow."

"I can't. I can't!"

The missionary prayed. But the footfall for which all waited did not sound; the young man who knelt beside the supplicant, with temples clutched in his hands, moved not. While the missionary's amen was yet unspoken, Parson Tombs, still kneeling, began to ask aloud,

'Will Brother Garnet

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But Garnet was wiser. "Father Tombs," he cried, the Lord be with you, lead us in prayer yourself!"

"Amen!" cried the other pastor. He was echoed by a dozen of his flock, and the old man lifted his voice in tremulous invocation. The prayer was long. But before there were signs of its ending, the step for which so many an ear was strained had been heard. Men were groaning, "God be praised!" and "Hallelujah!" Fannie's eyes were wet, tears were welling through Barbara's fingers, mourners were coming forward in both aisles, and John March was kneeling in the anxious seat.

(To be continued.)

M.S.T

THE FRENCH IN HOLLAND *

PAINTED BY FRANÇOIS FLAMENG

By Philip Gilbert Hamerton

SOME readers will remember a little treatise by M. Taine on "The Philosophy of Art," in which he advocated the theory that the artist is the product of his time. Taine had a full belief in this theory himself, and supported it by many arguments and examples. Since then a new opinion has found expression. Artistic genius, it is said, exists independently of everything else, and there has never been an artistic epoch. Spiritus spirat ubi vult alike in time and space. The artist appears where he is least expected, and when the most elaborate preparations are made for his reception, the world may wait for him in vain.

Each of the two doctrines contains a portion of the truth. The artist is nothing without a natural gift, and the natural gift is sure to prove abortive unless he is favorably situated for its development. Harmen, the miller, has a son born at Leyden near the beginning of the seventeenth century. The artistic and theological influences of Leyden and Amsterdam operate upon the child, and the result is Rembrandt. The same influences operated upon a child of inferior natural endowment, and the result was only Van Vliet. But if the child Rembrandt had been born in the twelfth century he would have illuminated missals, and if he had had the Shetland Islands for his birthplace he would have learned no fine art whatever.

M. François Flameng is one of the best modern instances of a natural gift

• See Frontispiece.

placed in the happiest situation for its own culture. For an artistic temperament of his lively and rapidly assimilative nature, there is no place in the world like Paris, and François Flameng had all that Paris could give to him in his youth, besides one incalculable advantage that belonged to himself alone. His father, M. Leopold Flameng, the celebrated etcher and engraver, like most members of his profession, regretted that he had not been a painter, and having been himself debarred from following painting otherwise than as an amateur (with a substantial foundation of learned drawing), became ambitious, in that art, for his son. The boy was thus brought up from his earliest infancy in a house where art was the constant subject of discussion, and as an experienced engraver acquires a closer knowledge of the works of painters than is common among painters themselves, the elder Flameng continually directed his son's attention to the qualities of great masters. extreme versatility which has marked the son's career as an artist may be due, in great measure, to the catholicity of the father's interest in the fine arts. It was the elder Flameng who gave life to modern engraving in France, by adapting etching to the interpretation of certain kinds of painting with which it is most closely in harmony; and yet it was the same engraver who used the burin for the interpretation of classical painting with a purity and severity that recalled the masters of the sixteenth century. Be

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tween the extremes of apparently free etching and scrupulously accurate burin work, Leopold Flameng employed many intermediate varieties of execution, his only invariable rule being to put his work into harmony with that which he had to translate; and he translated all kinds of painting, both conscientiously and with pleasure, provided only that they were good.

François received the beginnings of a classical literary education at the Lycée Louis le Grand; but this seems to have been interrupted by the siege of Paris, though the classes continued to be held as long as possible, even after the opening of the bombardment, and a schoolfellow of Flameng's remembers how they translated a Greek text to the tune of an incessant cannonade in the cold and gloom of the dreariest of all Parisian Decembers. This is the last glimpse we have of young Flameng as a literary student. Next, we find him at Brussels working hard as a student of the old masters and copying them diligently in the galleries. On returning to Paris he went on exclusively with his artistic education, and after the usual preparatory work became a student at the École des Beaux Arts under Cabanel, who perceived that he had original talent and did what he could to give it a safe direction, not without some rude earnestness of manner. This work at the École may have been necessary to the young painter, but what pleased him more was the incessant work at home, in a studio of his own high up in a house on the Boulevard Mont Parnasse, where he studied under his father's guidance. I knew the family in those times and well remember my astonishment at the young man's progress. As I saw his work only at intervals, it seemed to advance "by leaps and bounds." His first picture in the Salon was "Le Lutrin" (a church music-stand with a chorister singing), exhibited in 1875, a cleverly painted picture, full of character, though there was but a single figure. Soon after this good beginning the universal French military service claimed the artist's time and interrupted his career. So far, however, from weakening his powers, it seemed actually to have

strengthened them by a restraint analogous to the damming up of waters, for in 1879 he attracted universal attention by "l'Appel des Girondins," a most striking scene in the prison of the Conciergerie on the morning of October 30, 1793, where the Girondins have breakfasted together for the last time, when they were called for execution. There was such strength of conception in this work, so much expression, and such a complete mastery in the representation of all the details of a most impressive scene, that it was immediately recognized as one of the most notable pictures of the year and soon became in one sense the most notable of all, as it gained the Prix du Salon. Other historical pictures followed, some on a still larger scale, and I remember being disappointed by what seemed to me a misdirection of energy in the production of the kind of picture known as the grande machine, which is often resorted to by rising French artists when they are determined to attract attention at all costs. As it turned out, however, these works on a great scale were of the utmost practical value in the painter's education, since they prepared him for his vast mural compositions. François Flameng is one of the few artists to whom the scale of their works is a matter of complete indifference. He is equally at home in a wall-painting and a tiny canvas or panel that he finishes with the minuteness of a Meissonier. His abundant energy embraces everything that concerns his art. For example, the wall-paintings at the Sorbonne and elsewhere are surrounded by elaborate ornamental borders as a sort of framework, or, at least, decorative margin. Most artists would intrust work of that kind to a subordinate, but Flameng not only designs it, he paints it all with his own hand.

He does not confine himself, as to date, either to this century or any other in particular, but chooses his subjects indifferently in any time from the Middle Ages downward to our own. Still, I think it is easy to see that his strongest and most lively artistic sympathies attach themselves to the life and costume of the eighteenth century, which he has studied perhaps as closely,

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