ow
enough to call very stodgy, but flavoured withal and a trifle lubricated
by Gavarni's two drawings, which had somehow so much, in general, to
say.

Let me not however dally by the way, when nothing, at those hours, I
make out, so much spoke to us as the animated pictured halls within the
Palace, primarily those of the Senate of the Empire, but then also
forming, as with extensions they still and much more copiously form, the
great Paris museum of contemporary art. This array was at that stage a
comparatively (though only comparatively) small affair; in spite of
which fact we supposed it vast and final--so that it would have shocked
us to foreknow how in many a case, and of the most cherished cases, the
finality was to break down. Most of the works of the modern schools that
we most admired are begging their bread, I fear, from door to door--that
is from one provincial museum or dim back seat to another; though we
were on much-subsequent returns to draw a long breath for the saved
state of some of the great things as to which our faith had been
clearest. It had been clearer for none, I recover, than for Couture's
Romains de la Decadence, recently acclaimed, at that time, as the last
word of the grand manner, but of the grand manner modernised, humanised,
philosophised, redeemed from academic death; so that it was to this
master's school that the young American contemporary flutter taught its
wings to fly straightest, and that I could never, in the long aftertime,
face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and marvels without a rush
of memories and a stir of ghosts. William Hunt, the New Englander of
genius, the "Boston painter" whose authority was greatest during the
thirty years from 1857 or so, and with whom for a time in the early
period W. J. was to work all devotedly, had prolonged his studies in
Paris under the inspiration of Couture and of Edouard Frere; masters in
a group completed by three or four of the so finely interesting
landscapists of that and the directly previous age, Troyon, Rousseau,
Daubigny, even Lambinet and others, and which summed up for the American
collector and in the New York and Boston markets the idea of the modern
in the masterly. It was a comfortable time--when appreciation could go
so straight, could rise, and rise higher, without critical contortions;
when we could, I mean, be both so intelligent and so "quiet." We were
in our immediate circle to know Couture himself a little towa