ublic resort in the capital.
There is many a shop-keeper whose sign is a very tolerable picture;
and often have we stopped to admire (the reader will give us credit for
having remained OUTSIDE) the excellent workmanship of the grapes and
vine-leaves over the door of some very humble, dirty, inodorous shop of
a marchand de vin.

These, however, serve only to educate the public taste, and are
ornaments for the most part much too costly for the people. But the
same love of ornament which is shown in their public places of resort,
appears in their houses likewise; and every one of our readers who has
lived in Paris, in any lodging, magnificent or humble, with any family,
however poor, may bear witness how profusely the walls of his smart
salon in the English quarter, or of his little room au sixieme in the
Pays Latin, has been decorated with prints of all kinds. In the first,
probably, with bad engravings on copper from the bad and tawdry pictures
of the artists of the time of the Empire; in the latter, with gay
caricatures of Granville or Monnier: military pieces, such as are dashed
off by Raffet, Charlet, Vernet (one can hardly say which of the three
designers has the greatest merit, or the most vigorous hand); or clever
pictures from the crayon of the Deverias, the admirable Roqueplan,
or Decamp. We have named here, we believe, the principal lithographic
artists in Paris; and those--as doubtless there are many--of our readers
who have looked over Monsieur Aubert's portfolios, or gazed at that
famous caricature-shop window in the Rue de Coq, or are even acquainted
with the exterior of Monsieur Delaporte's little emporium in the
Burlington Arcade, need not be told how excellent the productions of all
these artists are in their genre. We get in these engravings the loisirs
of men of genius, not the finikin performances of labored mediocrity, as
with us: all these artists are good painters, as well as good designers;
a design from them is worth a whole gross of Books of Beauty; and if we
might raise a humble supplication to the artists in our own country of
similar merit--to such men as Leslie, Maclise, Herbert, Cattermole, and
others--it would be, that they should, after the example of their French
brethren and of the English landscape painters, take chalk in hand,
produce their own copies of their own sketches, and never more draw a
single "Forsaken One," "Rejected One," "Dejected One" at the entreaty
of any publisher or f