he commonplace and comfortable look of a growing
quarter of Paris. Its famous old walls have been improved off the face
of the earth; and I am glad to say that few if any of the noisome
cellars seem still to exist in which, when I first knew the place, not
so very long ago, thousands of its industrious working people used to
dwell like troglodytes.

Marlborough's cannon spared the fine seventeenth-century Spanish Lonja,
and there are traces still to be discerned about the modernised mairie
of the ancient palace of Jean Sans Peur and Charles the Fifth. But there
is no Flemish building here comparable with the Hotel de Ville and the
Beffroi of Douai. Of old Flemish customs and traditions, however, there
is no lack in Lille, and I came upon a curious proof of the vitality of
its local patriotism. This was the regular publication, in the most
widely circulated morning newspaper, of a series of carefully prepared
articles on the archaeology and antiquities, the legends and the archives
of the old Flemish capital. One of the editors of this journal showed me
in his office a collection of these articles, reprinted from the
newspaper, and now filling some twenty volumes.

I spent my first midsummer morning at Lille in the Musee which has been
installed in the Hotel de Ville. The Wicar collection of drawings there,
I need hardly say, is of itself a 'liberal education' in art. During his
long residence at Rome in the Via del Vantaggio, the Chevalier
Jean-Baptiste Wicar wasted neither his time nor his money. What
treasures were then to be picked up by such a man--for Wicar died not
long after the Revolution of July 1830! Where he found his Masaccios,
Robert Browning told me that he knew; but where did he find that
incomparable bust in wax which charms with all the mystic feminine grace
and more than all the feminine beauty of the Mona Lisa? Possibly M.
Carolus Duran may be able to throw light upon this; for he was one of
the earliest beneficiaries who profited by the fund which the Chevalier
Wicar founded for the purpose, as he says in his will, of 'giving to
young men, natives of Lille, who devote themselves to the fine arts, the
means of sojourning at Rome for four years, under certain conditions.'

The Chevalier Wicar was a good Catholic, and he gave to his fund the
title of the 'pious foundation of Wicar.'

I suppose that under the Third Republic this monstrous recognition of an
unscientific emotion would have sufficed to v