homely as a harrow or a spade. The
scientific part of the country has little influence, in this way, on the
operative. The chasm between knowledge and ignorance is so vast in
France, that it requires a long time for the simplest idea to find its
way across it.

Exhibitions are everywhere bad guides to the average civilization of a
country, as it is usual to expose only the objects that have been
wrought with the greatest care. In a popular sense, they are proofs of
what can be done, rather than of what _is_ done. The cloths that I saw
in the booths, for instance, are not to be met with in the shops; the
specimens of fire-arms, glass, cutlery, etc., etc., too, are all much
superior to anything one finds on sale. But this is the case everywhere,
from the boarding-school to the military parade, men invariably putting
the best foot foremost when they are to be especially inspected. This is
not the difference I mean. Familiar as every American, at all accustomed
to the usages of genteel life in his own country, must be with the
better manufactures of Great Britain, I think he would be struck by the
inferiority of even the best specimens of the commoner articles that
were here laid before the public. But when it came to the articles of
elegance and luxury, as connected with forms, taste, and execution,
though not always in ingenuity and extent of comfort, I should think
that no Englishman, let his rank in life be what it would, could pass
through this wilderness of elegancies without wonder.

Even the manufactures in which we, or rather the English (for I now
refer more to use than to production), ordinarily excel, such as
carpets, rugs, porcelain, plate, and all the higher articles of personal
comfort, _as exceptions_, surpass those of which we have any notion. I
say, _as exceptions_, not in the sense by which we distinguish the
extraordinary efforts of the ordinary manufacturer, in order to make a
figure at an exhibition, but certain objects produced in certain
exclusive establishments that are chiefly the property of the crown, as
they have been the offspring of regal taste and magnificence.

Of this latter character is the Sevres china. There are manufactures of
this name of a quality that brings them within the reach of moderate
fortunes, it is true; but one obtains no idea of the length to which
luxury and taste have been pushed in this branch of art without
examining the objects made especially for the king, who is