looked upon his suffering martyrs, could suppose for a moment that he
honoured their martyrdom. They were but the vehicles for his hate of
humanity. He was the torturer, and not Diocletian or Nero.

"But, stranger yet to tell, there was no picture, whatever its subject,
into which he did not introduce one form of placid and harmonious
loveliness. In this, however, his fierceness was only more fully
displayed. For in no case did this form manifest any relation either to
the actors or the endurers in the picture. Hence its very loveliness
became almost hateful to those who beheld it. Not a shade crossed the
still sky of that brow, not a ripple disturbed the still sea of that
cheek. She did not hate, she did not love the sufferers: the painter would
not have her hate, for that would be to the injury of her loveliness:
would not have her love, for he hated. Sometimes she floated above, as a
still, unobservant angel, her gaze turned upward, dreaming along, careless
as a white summer cloud, across the blue. If she looked down on the scene
below, it was only that the beholder might see that she saw and did not
care--that not a feather of her outspread pinions would quiver at the
sight. Sometimes she would stand in the crowd, as if she had been copied
there from another picture, and had nothing to do with this one, nor any
right to be in it at all. Or when the red blood was trickling drop by drop
from the crushed limb, she might be seen standing nearest, smiling over a
primrose or the bloom on a peach. Some had said that she was the painter's
wife; that she had been false to him; that he had killed her; and, finding
that that was no sufficing revenge, thus half in love, and half in deepest
hate, immortalized his vengeance. But it was now universally understood
that it was his daughter, of whose loveliness extravagant reports went
abroad; though all said, doubtless reading this from her father's
pictures, that she was a beauty without a heart. Strange theories of
something else supplying its place were rife among the anatomical