olds and Gainsborough,
perhaps of Turner, but Constable and Moreland, Wilkie and Webster,
Mulready, and the rest of the younger school, were simply so many names.
But when the critics did become aware of their existence, their
criticisms were simply a delightful series of essays, guiding the most
ignorant to a due appreciation of those Englishmen's talents, not
stinting praise, but by no means withholding blame, instinctively
focussing merits and defects in a few brilliant paragraphs, which
detected the painter's intention and conception as well as his execution
both from a technical, as well as dramatic, graphic, and pictorial point
of view; which showed, not only the influence of general surroundings,
but dissected the result of individual tendencies. Many a time since,
when wading through the adipose as well as verbose columns dealing with
similar subjects in English newspapers, have I longed for the literary
fleshpots of France, which contained and contain real nourishing
substance, not the fatty degeneration of an ignoramus's brain, and, what
is worse, of an ignoramus who speaks in numbers from a less valid
reason than Pope's; for the most repellant peculiarity of these
effusions are the numbers. It would seem that these would-be critics,
having no more than the ordinary auctioneer's intellect, endeavour as
much as possible to assimilate their effusions to a catalogue. They are
an abomination to the man who can write, though he may know nothing
about painting, and to the man who knows about painting and cannot
write. The pictorial art of England must indeed be a hardy plant to have
survived the approval and the disapproval of these barbarians.

To come back to the Queen, who, after leaving the Palais de l'Industrie,
drove to several points of interest in Paris, notably to la
Sainte-Chapelle. The route taken was by the Rue de Rivoli and the
Pont-Neuf; the return journey was effected by the Pont-aux-Changes and
the eastern end of the same street, which had only been opened recently,
as far as the Place de la Bastille. Then, and then only, her Majesty
caught sight of the Boulevards in the whole of their extent. The
decorations of the previous day but one had not been touched, and the
crowds were simply one tightly wedged-in mass of humanity. A
journalistic friend had procured me a _permis de circuler_--in other
words, "a police pass,"--and I made the way from the Boulevard
Beaumarchais to Tortoni on foot. It may be in