so that, for example, the words "Thiers spoke at Coulmiers"
become "M. Adolphe Thiers, president of the French Republic before the
accession of the present Chief Executive, Marshal MacMahon, delivered an
address, or rather made some remarks partly in the nature of an oration
or speech on subjects connected with matters of interest at the present
time, at the town of Coulmiers, which is situated"--and here follow a
dozen lines from the Cyclopaedia, but dated at Paris, giving the
geography, history, and commerce of Coulmiers. One can fancy in the
"Atlantic cable" columns of the "Morning Meteor" the tokens of a
standing prescription to dilute foreign facts with nine parts domestic
verbiage; and this kind of "editing" educates mankind to padding and
patching with superfluous material.

It is harder for French writers to be prolix. The French writer is
inevitably epigrammatic first, and, if diffusive afterward, it is with
malice aforethought. If we compare, for example, publicists like Guizot
and Gladstone, while each has that perfect command of his material,
instead of letting the material command him, which marks the skilful
writer, yet the Englishman sometimes seems to require two or three
consecutive sentences to bring out his thought, whereas M. Guizot packs
it into one. But Guizot deliberately goes on to put the identical
statement into two or three paraphrased forms. For example, in the
"History of Civilization in Europe" there is usually a terse sentence or
two in each paragraph which contain the whole of it, packed into
briefest compass; were these key sentences repeated on the side of the
page as marginal notes, the reader could master the book by mastering
the margins. When an English writer is diffuse, he cannot help it; when
a French writer is diffuse, he effects it by sheer effort at repetition.

And we humble hack scribblers, who confidingly slip our daily, and
weekly, and monthly mites into the vast mass of current reading turned
out for an omnivorous public--let us hope that the world's maw may long
remain unsated and the market unglutted.

GROWTH OF AMERICAN TASTE FOR ART.

While to many it has seemed a pity that the Johnston gallery should be
broken up, yet this distribution of its treasures scatters the seeds of
art education. Besides, the prices obtained at the sale must impress
many wealthy men with a conviction valuable to the interests of art;
namely, that pictures, like diamonds, are a safe inv