happiness of some may not be a crime and accursed of God. The husbandman
as he sows his grain must know that he is working at the work of life,
and not rejoice because Death is walking beside him. In a word, death
must no longer be the punishment of prosperity or the consolation of
adversity. God did not destine death as a punishment or a compensation
for life; for he blessed life, and the grave should not be a refuge to
which it is permitted to send those who cannot be made happy.

Certain artists of our time, casting a serious glance upon their
surroundings, strive to depict grief, the abjectness of poverty,
Lazarus's dunghill. That may be within the domain of art and philosophy;
but, by representing poverty as so ugly, so base, and at times so
vicious and criminal a thing, do they attain their end, and is the
effect as salutary as they could wish? We do not dare to say. We may be
told that by pointing out the abyss that yawns beneath the fragile crust
of opulence, they terrify the wicked rich man, as, in the time of the
_Danse Macabre_, they showed him its yawning ditch, and Death ready to
wind its unclean arms about him. To-day, they show him the thief picking
his lock, the assassin watching until he sleeps. We confess that we do
not clearly understand how they will reconcile him with the humanity he
despises, how they will move his pity for the sufferings of the poor man
whom he fears, by showing him that same poor man in the guise of the
escaped felon and the burglar. Ghastly Death, gnashing his teeth and
playing the violin in the productions of Holbein and his predecessors,
found it impossible in that guise to convert the perverse and to comfort
their victims. Is it not a fact that the literature of our day is in
this respect following to some extent in the footsteps of the artists of
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance?

Holbein's drunkards fill their glasses in a sort of frenzied desire to