at he would have been scorched up, like Semele, by sights
too tremendous for his vision to bear. One cannot imagine him, with our
small physical endowments and weaknesses, a man like ourselves.

As for the Ecole Royale des Beaux Arts, then, and all the good its
students have done, as students, it is stark naught. When the men did
anything, it was after they had left the academy, and began thinking for
themselves. There is only one picture among the many hundreds that has,
to my idea, much merit (a charming composition of Homer singing, signed
Jourdy); and the only good that the Academy has done by its pupils was
to send them to Rome, where they might learn better things. At home, the
intolerable, stupid classicalities, taught by men who, belonging to the
least erudite country in Europe, were themselves, from their profession,
the least learned among their countrymen, only weighed the pupils down,
and cramped their hands, their eyes, and their imaginations; drove them
away from natural beauty, which, thank God, is fresh and attainable by
us all, to-day, and yesterday, and to-morrow; and sent them rambling
after artificial grace, without the proper means of judging or attaining
it.

A word for the building of the Palais des Beaux Arts. It is beautiful,
and as well finished and convenient as beautiful. With its light and
elegant fabric, its pretty fountain, its archway of the Renaissance, and
fragments of sculpture, you can hardly see, on a fine day, a place more
riant and pleasing.

Passing from thence up the picturesque Rue de Seine, let us walk to the
Luxembourg, where bonnes, students, grisettes, and old gentlemen with
pigtails, love to wander in the melancholy, quaint old gardens; where
the peers have a new and comfortable court of justice, to judge all the
emeutes which are to take place; and where, as everybody knows, is the
picture-gallery of modern French artists, whom government thinks worthy
of patronage.

A very great proportion of the pictures, as we see by the catalogue,
are by the students whose works we have just been to visit at the Beaux
Arts, and who, having performed their pilgrimage to Rome, have taken
rank among the professors of the art. I don't know a more pleasing
exhibition; for there are not a dozen really bad pictures in the
collection, some very good, and the rest showing great skill and
smartness of execution.

In the same way, however, that it has been supposed that no man could be
a gr