cavalcade with streaming banners galloping along the road to Bethlehem, there the shepherds peacefully tending their flocks on the grassy slope, their watch beguiled by the strains of a bagpipe; here the scene at the Manger, all love and devotion, and the running stream nigh by at which the horses are being watered the while the Magi are making their act of adoration, there the kings with their retinues triumphantly riding away over the rocky heights; anon we have the sequence of miracles that attended the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt—the wheat that grew and ripened in a day, the date-palm bending to offer its fruit to the Virgin Mother resting beneath its shade while the unsaddled ass grazes as it lists and Joseph fetches water from a neighbouring spring; elsewhere the risen Christ appearing to the fishing apostles, and far beyond across the waters in the background the setting of the sun in all its glory. Every scene that lends itself to the treatment has its beauty enhanced by the beauties of Nature. The one sorrowful incident in the whole story, the Massacre of the Innocents, is a mere suggestion of this cruel episode. Memlinc’s nature shrank from the interpretation of evil, and in this particular instance has admirably succeeded in commemorating the incident of the massacre without involving it in any of its horror. A pleasing innovation may also be noticed in the treatment of his portraits of donors, Peter Bultinc and his son being introduced as devout spectators of the scene presented in the stable at Bethlehem, which they humbly contemplate through an opening in the wall. “The more one examines this picture, the greater one’s astonishment at the amount of work which Memlinc has lavished on it, at the exquisite beauty of the various scenes, the marvellous ingenuity displayed in separating them one from another, and the skill with which they balance and are brought into one harmonious whole.”