We need not take into account the got-up absurdities and paintings to puzzle Rosicrucian simpletons; nor, again, the feeble imagery of the wealthy idlers or the worthy youths who fancy that if they paint a woman larger than life, that makes her mystical.
Silence would befit the subject, only that, unluckily, a well-meaning publisher was struck by the idea of mobilizing the clerical forces to hail James Tissot as an evangelical painter.

His Life of Christ is one of the least religious works conceivable, for, in fact, it might be regarded as a hesitating paraphrase of the Life of Jesus as narrated by that cheerful apostate and terrible jester, Renan.
The firm of Mame has completed this artist's treason by the issue of these melancholy chromo-lithographs.

Under the pretext of realism, of information acquired on the spot, of authenticated costumes--all extremely doubtful, since we should be forced to conclude that nothing has changed in Palestine in the course of nineteen centuries--Monsieur Tissot has given us the basest masquerade that anyone has yet dared present as an illustration of the Scriptures.

Look at that disreputable trull, a street slut tired of shouting "This way to the boats!" till she falls fainting.

This is the _Magnificat_, the Blessed Virgin.