ooden stalls, three miles long, on each side of
that immense thoroughfare; and wherever a retiring house or two admits
of a double line, there it is. All sorts of objects from shoes and
sabots, through porcelain and crystal, up to live fowls and rabbits
which are played for at a sort of dwarf skittles (to their immense
disturbance, as the ball rolls under them and shakes them off their
shelves and perches whenever it is delivered by a vigorous hand), are on
sale in this great Fair. And what you may get in the way of ornament for
two-pence, is astounding." Unhappily there came dark and rainy weather,
and one of the improvements of the Empire ended, as so many others did,
in slush and misery.[205]

Some sketches connected with the Art Exposition in the winter of 1855,
and with the fulfilment of Ary Scheffer's design to paint the portrait
of Dickens, may close these Paris pictures. He did not think that
English art showed to advantage beside the French. It seemed to him
small, shrunken, insignificant, "niggling." He thought the general
absence of ideas horribly apparent; "and even when one comes to
Mulready, and sees two old men talking over a much-too-prominent
table-cloth, and reads the French explanation of their proceedings, 'La
discussion sur les principes de Docteur Whiston,' one is dissatisfied.
Somehow or other they don't tell. Even Leslie's Sancho wants go, and
Stanny is too much like a set-scene. It is of no use disguising the fact
that what we know to be wanting in the men is wanting in their
works--character, fire, purpose, and the power of using the vehicle and
the model as mere means to an end. There is a horrible respectability
about most of the best of them--a little, finite, systematic routine in
them, strangely expressive to me of the state of England itself. As a
mere fact, Frith, Ward, and Egg, come out the best in such pictures as
are here, and attract to the greatest extent. The first, in the picture
from the Good-natured Man; the second, in the Royal Family in the
Temple; the third, in the Peter the Great first seeing Catherine--which
I always thought a good picture, and in which foreigners evidently
descry a sudden dramatic touch that pleases them. There are no end of
bad pictures among the French, but, Lord! the goodness also!--the
fearlessness of them; the bold drawing; the dashing conception; the
passion and action in them![206] The Belgian department is full of
merit. It has the best landscape i