of the school of David. Certainly no great

    penchant

   towards the antique is discoverable in his father's works; nor in his own do we find painted casts of Greek statues dressed in the uniforms of the nineteenth century. At twenty, it is true, he tried, but without success, the classic subject offered to competition at the Academy for the prize of visiting Rome. The study of the antique did not much delight him. On the contrary, he rather joined with the innovators, whose example was then undermining the over-classic influence of David's school, the most formidable and influential of whom, a youth about his own age, and a fellow-student in his father's atelier, was then painting a great picture, sadly decried at the time, but now considered one of the masterpieces of the French school in the Louvre—the "Raft of the Medusa." Gericault was his companion in the studio and in the field, at the easel and on horseback; and we might trace here one of the many instances of the influence which this powerful and original

   genius exercised on the young artists of his time, and which, had it not been arrested by his premature death in January, 1824, would have made Gericault more strikingly distinguished as one of the master-spirits in French Art, and the head of a school entirely the opposite to that of David.

   Horace's youth, however, did not pass entirely under the smiles of fortune. He had to struggle with those difficulties of narrow means with which a very large number of young artists are tolerably intimate. He had to weather the gales of poverty by stooping to all sorts of illustrative work, whose execution we fancy must have been often a severe trial to him. Any youth aiming at "high art," and feeling, though poor, too proud to bend in order to feed the taste, (grotesque and unrefined enough, it must be allowed,) of the good public, which artists somewhat naturally estimate rather contemptuously, might get a lesson of patience by looking over an endless series of the most variedly hideous costumes or caricatures of costume which Horace was glad to draw, for almost any pecuniary consideration. A series of amusingly

    naive

   colored prints, illustrating the adventures of poor La Vallière with Louis XIV., would strengthen the lesson. These were succeeded by lithographs of an endless variety of subjects—the soldier's life in all its phases, the "horse and its rider" in all their costumes, snatches of romances, fables, caricatures, humorous pieces, men, 

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