and stood alone amid a generation of Epigoni. Some dealers' agents have circulated the idea that, though quite incapable of rising to the height of the fashionable performers, he admired their productions; they have insinuated that he realised the 'greatness' of those twaddling amateurs Ganguin and Cézanne, Matisse and Van Gogh, a greatness which he could not attain. He certainly could not. Michelangelo could not be Bandinelli, Johnson could not be Mr. James Macpherson, nor Burke be Bute. And, in final refutation of all the garbled anecdotes and groundless rumours of the critics, we have Sargent's own words repudiating any respect for any of the post-impressionist fry.

Sargent was by intellect and culture free from all passing fashions in opinion; the fallacies of modernism did not touch him. He belonged to the company who have found perfect freedom in the service of arduous truth. He had not, it is true, the intimate and homely sympathy or the mysterious style of Rembrandt; he had not the incomparably sober splendour, the Olympian universality, the grave harmonious handling of Titian. The state and calmness and delicacy of Velasquez are beyond his attainment; the simple equity of Holbein, the beauty of Vandyck, he did not match. And there is a humanity and a consummation of style in Reynolds which makes him, in Ruskin's words, 'the prince of portrait painters.' These supreme few Sargent did not equal. He had not their monumental manner. But below these there are none with whom he cannot share full honours. Rubens is not more vigorous; he is less subtle and less comprehensive. Tintoretto and Veronese equal him in moral, but not in visual truth, if they are more monumental. Watts is a poet; but his manner is hesitating and fragmentary, where Sargent's is decisive and complete. Watts himself said of Sargent's work, 'Did you ever see such ?' Raphael is immature, even in his perfection, beside Sargent, and shows no sense of moral life, or even of moral existence. The rest must stand below him-Gainsborough, Goya, Hals and Raeburn; the French and Italian and Dutch and English schools, with all their ability and truth.

I have spoken of Sargent mainly as a portrait painter-even though his dreams and aspirations lay elsewhere. His landscapes, though vivid, were slighter altogether; his decorations do not occupy so much of his activity, fine though they are. He was perhaps deceived by bitter knowledge of the world into a love for Nature and the ideal which was not knowledge. But in the art of biography he is supreme. His highest powers were concentrated, even if with unsatisfied heart, to the aim which was the eloquent and sufficient epitaph of Mandell Creighton: 'He tried to write true history.' He succeeded with a brilliance usually won only by joy, and not by will and intellect alone,

but which places him with Gibbon, Thucydides, Tacitus, Macaulay, Carlyle, as with the protagonists of painting. They, too, were not poets: the ideal is not for history; nor is the higher truth, the higher seriousness. His detractors will 'perish as the summer fly,' 'heads without name, remembered not.' He will live, though he be not a poet, to astonish and delight the remotest generations.

A REPLY TO THE HON. A. S. MALCOLM, M.L.C.

IN a recent number of the Nineteenth Century and After,1 the Hon. A. S. Malcolm, one of my colleagues in the Legislative Council of New Zealand, has given his reasons for thinking that the Empire is in danger of disintegration' because, as he puts it, in the executive sense of the word we have no Empire. There is no person or body that can speak for the Empire or put it in action.' His remedy is that something in the nature of an Imperial Parliament should be set up, composed of representatives of the Dominions as well as of the Mother Country. Although he does not say so in so many words, he leaves it to be inferred that in all matters affecting the Empire as a whole the King is to take the advice of a Cabinet selected from this Parliament, and that the