ented this method of applying pressure to
the brain. That was a hundred years ago. Try if you can count upon your
fingers the men of genius among the prizemen of those hundred years.

In the first place, no deliberate effort of schoolmaster or
administrator can replace the miracles of chance which produce great
men: of all the mysteries of generation, this most defies the ambitious
modern scientific investigator. In the second--the ancient Egyptians
(we are told) invented incubator-stoves for hatching eggs; what would be
thought of Egyptians who should neglect to fill the beaks of the callow
fledglings? Yet this is precisely what France is doing. She does
her utmost to produce artists by the artificial heat of competitive
examination; but, the sculptor, painter, engraver, or musician once
turned out by this mechanical process, she no more troubles herself
about them and their fate than the dandy cares for yesterday's flower in
his buttonhole. And so it happens that the really great man is a Greuze,
a Watteau, a Felicien David, a Pagnesi, a Gericault, a Decamps, an
Auber, a David d'Angers, an Eugene Delacroix, or a Meissonier--artists
who take but little heed of _grande prix_, and spring up in the open
field under the rays of that invisible sun called Vocation.

To resume. The Government sent Sylvain Pons to Rome to make a great
musician of himself; and in Rome Sylvain Pons acquired a taste for
the antique and works of art. He became an admirable judge of those
masterpieces of the brain and hand which are summed up by the useful
neologism "bric-a-brac;" and when the child of Euterpe returned to
Paris somewhere about the year 1810, it was in the character of a rabid
collector, loaded with pictures, statuettes, frames, wood-carving,
ivories, enamels, porcelains, and the like. He had sunk the greater
part of his patrimony, not so much in the purchases themselves as on the
expenses of transit; and every penny inherited from his mother had
been spent in the course of a three-years' travel in Italy after the
residence in Rome came to an end. He had seen Venice, Milan, Florence,
Bologna, and Naples leisurely, as he wished to see them, as a dreamer of
dreams, and a philosopher; careless of the future, for an artist looks
to his talent for support as the _fille de joie_ counts upon her beauty.

All through those splendid years of travel Pons was as happy as was
possible to a man with a great soul, a sensitive nature, and a face