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This is the furnace by which he fuses his forty pounds or fifty pounds of platinum at once. The metal is raised to a heat that no eye can bear. There is no light and shadow, no chiaro-oscuro there; all is the same intensity of glow. You look in, and you cannot see where the metal or the lime is; it is all as one.

Another consequence of this want of air is that absolute darkness reigns where the sun's rays do not penetrate. That which on earth is called diffusion of light, that luminous matter which the air holds in suspension, which creates the twilight and the daybreak, which produces the umbrae and penumbrae, and all the magic of chiaro-oscuro, does not exist on the moon.

Follow us, then, reader, in imagination, out of the gay watering- place, with its London shops and London equipages, along the broad road beneath the sunny limestone cliff, tufted with golden furze; past the huge oaks and green slopes of Tor Abbey; and past the fantastic rocks of Livermead, scooped by the waves into a labyrinth of double and triple caves, like Hindoo temples, upborne on pillars banded with yellow and white and red, a week's study, in form and colour and chiaro-oscuro, for any artist; and a mile or so further along a pleasant road, with land-locked glimpses of the bay, to the broad sheet of sand which lies between the village of Paignton and the sea sands trodden a hundred times by Montagu and Turton, perhaps, by Dillwyn and Gaertner, and many another pioneer of science.

He dashes massive paint in huge spaces over the subtle old work, puts in his own chiaro-oscuro where all had been shadeless, and his own violent colour where all had been pale, and repaints the faces so as to make them, to his notion, prettier and more human: some of this upper work has, however, come away since, and the original outline, at least, is traceable; while in the face of the Logic, the Music, and one or two others, the original work is very pure.

William of Orange gave the painter lodgings at Hampton Court, where it seems he painted the Labours of Hercules in chiaro-oscuro, and repaired Andrea Mantegna's pictures of the Triumphs of Julius Cæsar. The commissioners for rebuilding St. Paul's Cathedral unanimously chose Laguerre to decorate the cupola with frescoes.

They could no longer grasp the respective distances of the different plains. A lunar landscape without the softening of the phenomena of chiaro-oscuro could not be rendered by an earthly landscape painter; it would be spots of ink on a white page nothing more.

No one gets farther away from the academic grayness, the colorless chiaro-oscuro of the conventional painters. He runs his key up and loads his canvas, occasionally, in what one may call not so much barbaric as uncultivated and elementary fashion.

Round the church ran a low wall; over-topping the wall in general level was the graveyard; not as a graveyard usually is, a fragment of landscape with its due variety of chiaro-oscuro, but a mere profile against the sky, serrated with the outlines of graves and a very few memorial stones. Not a tree could exist up there: nothing but the monotonous gray-green grass.

There was room both for criticism and indignation, for the display, in so small a compass, of bad drawing, vile composition, ridiculous chiaro-oscuro, and impossible perspective, could only have been justified by the supposition that his intellect had been warped through the heart, in consequence of an unheard of perplexity connected therewith.

In November, 1879, when this "Study in chiaro-oscuro" was published, renewed attention was being directed to the Eurasian community in India, mainly by the discussions in all circles aroused by the publication of the late Archdeacon Baly's Bengal Social Science Association Paper of May in the same year, which dealt with the employment, inter alia, of Europeans of mixed parentage in India; a question which still engages the anxious consideration of many Indian statesmen.