in
buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should
lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building. Nor
is it merely wasted wealth or distempered conception which we have to
regret in this Renaissance architecture: but we shall find in it partly
the root, partly the expression of certain dominant evils of modern
times--over-sophistication and ignorant classicalism; the one destroying
the healthfulness of general society, the other rendering our schools
and universities useless to a large number of the men who pass through
them.

"Now Venice, as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the
most corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her strength the
centre of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her
decline the source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and
splendor of the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its
eminence in the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her
dissipation, and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her
decrepitude than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers
into the grave.

"It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only, that effectual blows
can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance. Destroy its
claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else."

CONTRASTED PORTRAITS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE.

In the last number of _The International_ we quoted the remarks of Lord
Holland upon the character of the wife of Louis XVI. The sketch
presented by the noble author has been the subject of much and various
criticism. The London _Times_ says:

"The virtue of the unfortunate consort of a most unhappy
monarch is without a flaw. Enmity, hatred, and every evil
passion, have done their worst to palliate murder and to
blacken innocence, but the ineradicable spot cannot be fixed to
the fair fame of this true woman. Faultless she was not. We are
under no obligation to vindicate her imprudent, wilful, and
fatal interference with public questions in which she had no
concern; we say nothing of her ignorance of the high matters of
state into which her uninformed zeal conducted her, to the
bitter cost of herself and of those she loved dearest on earth;
but of her purity, her uprightness, her beneficence, her
devotion, her sweet, playful, happy disposition, in the midst
of those