or the pages of any Book of Beauty, Royalty, or
Loveliness whatever.

Can there be a more pleasing walk in the whole world than a stroll
through the Gallery of the Louvre on a fete-day; not to look so much at
the pictures as at the lookers-on? Thousands of the poorer classes
are there: mechanics in their Sunday clothes, smiling grisettes, smart
dapper soldiers of the line, with bronzed wondering faces, marching
together in little companies of six or seven, and stopping every now and
then at Napoleon or Leonidas as they appear in proper vulgar heroics in
the pictures of David or Gros. The taste of these people will hardly be
approved by the connoisseur, but they have A taste for art. Can the same
be said of our lower classes, who, if they are inclined to be sociable
and amused in their holidays, have no place of resort but the tap-room
or tea-garden, and no food for conversation except such as can be built
upon the politics or the police reports of the last Sunday paper?
So much has Church and State puritanism done for us--so well has it
succeeded in materializing and binding down to the earth the imagination
of men, for which God has made another world (which certain statesmen
take but too little into account)--that fair and beautiful world of
heart, in which there CAN be nothing selfish or sordid, of which Dulness
has forgotten the existence, and which Bigotry has endeavored to shut
out from sight--

"On a banni les demons et les fees,
Le raisonner tristement s'accredite:
On court, helas! apres la verite:
Ah! croyez moi, l'erreur a son merite!"

We are not putting in a plea here for demons and fairies, as Voltaire
does in the above exquisite lines; nor about to expatiate on the
beauties of error, for it has none; but the clank of steam-engines, and
the shouts of politicians, and the struggle for gain or bread, and the
loud denunciations of stupid bigots, have wellnigh smothered poor Fancy
among us. We boast of our science, and vaunt our superior morality.
Does the latter exist? In spite of all the forms which our policy
has invented to secure it--in spite of all the preachers, all the
meeting-houses, and all the legislative enactments--if any person will
take upon himself the painful labor of purchasing and perusing some
of the cheap periodical prints which form the people's library of
amusement, and contain what may be presumed to be their standard in
matters of imagination and fancy, he