27 JANUARY 1883, Page 3

Gustave Dore, the well-known artist, died in Paris on the

13rd inst. He was a singular example of a French artist who, though thoroughly French in spirit, found appreciation princi- pally in England. His pictures, despised in Paris, were admired. in London, where their scenic treatment of sacred subjects attracted the middle-class, and his illustrations made gigantic volumes like the three of Dante's trilogy popular in England. As an illustrator of books, Dor6 was very unequal, being sometimes original, more often maniere and stagey to the last degree ; but he was genuine in one direction, his love for the weird, which woke up some latent sympathy in British

minds. His greatest success was "The Wandering Jew," in which he rose occasionally to the conception of the awful ; while his greatest failure was the Bible, the sim- plicity of which he did not understand. His realisation of the levelling horror the Flood must have caused—the mother grasping the paw of a tiger perched on a rock, in order to heave her child higher out of the water—is, however, singularly powerful. He made great sums out of his English patrons, which he expended in building houses of the kind. which Alnaschar, the elder Dumas, and Edgar Poe imagined.