shadow where the palette of Veronese, the riot of purple, and of blonde
tresses may find sleep. Rural delights! murmurous and gorgeous
decorations! gardens thick with brier and rose! French landscapes
planted with Italian pines! villages gay with weddings and carriages,
ceremonies, toilettes, and fêtes stunned with the noise of violins and
flutes leading the bridal of Nature and the Opera to a Jesuit fane!
Rustic scene on the green curtain, on the flowery slope up which the
_Comédie Française_ climbs and the _Comédie Italienne_ gambols.

Quick! to array the spring in ball costume, Watteau's heavens and earth,
quick. _Gelosi!_ A bergomask laugh shall be the laughter, animation, and
action, and movement of the piece. Look where Folly, capped and belled,
runs and wakes gaiety, zephyrs, and noise! Ruffs and caps, belts and
daggers, little vests and short mantles, go and come. The band of
buffoons comes running, bringing beneath the shady boughs the carnival
of human passions and its rainbow-hued garb. Variegated family, clothed
with sunlight and brilliant silk! that masks with the night! that
patches and paints with the moon! Harlequin, as graceful as a product of
the pencil of Parmesan! Pierrot, with his arms at his side, as straight
as an I, and the Tartaglias, and the Scapins, and the Cassandras, and
the Doctors, and the favourite Mezzetin "the big brown man with the
laughing face" always in the foreground with his cap on the back of his
head--striped all over like a zebra, proud as a god, and drunk as a
Silenus! It is the _Comédie Italienne_ that plays the guitar in all
these landscapes....

Here is the new Olympus and the new mythology; the Olympus of all the
demi-gods forgotten by antiquity. Here is the deification of the ideas
of the Eighteenth Century, the soul of Watteau's world and time led to
the Pantheon of human passions and fashions. These are the new humours