He recalls that during his school-days there was much reading of history, literature, and archæology. In English his professor led him to read Newman and Ruskin--the two great masters of style, though the one was classic and the other romantic. In French there was De Musset, Balzac, Heine. He was familiar with Greek and Latin--he could not have graduated from a Catholic college without knowing Latin--and had early gone over the classical writers in the original languages. As for art, he studied engravings of Dürer and lithographs of the old masters. “An English water-color painter had been found who gave me thoroughly English lessons.” After college days he got lessons from a French artist. In later life, looking at his drawings made in the early fifties, he thought them “respectable.” “They were largely based on line and construction, which of course gives a basis of seriousness.” After graduation he entered a lawyer’s office and began studying law, though he still held his interest in art. Some pictures of the men of 1830 were beginning to come into the country and he recalls buying for a few dollars a Diaz, a Troyon, and a Bargue, and his delight in them. He met artists like Inness, talked art and thought much about it, but he was not yet prepared to embrace it for better or worse. In 1856, when he was twenty-one, he went to Europe, not minded even then to study art professionally, but merely wishing travel for travel’s sake and to be for a time a looker-on. He went directly to Paris and joined his cousin, Paul Binsse (or Bins), Comte de St. Victor, who was just then holding prominent place in literary and journalistic Paris. The cousin was writing in a brilliant style dramatic, literary, and art criticism for _Le Pays_, _La Presse_, and _La Liberté_, and publishing books such as _Hommes et Dieux_, _Barbares et Bandits_, _Les Dieux et les_ _Demi-Dieux de la peinture_. He was in association with the Goncourts, Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Flaubert--all the great gods of little Paris. The father, Jacques Benjamin Maximilien Binsse, Comte de St. Victor, had had a literary and artistic vogue before the son. He had been the editor of _La France_ and the _Journal des Débats_, had written for the stage and the opera, and was the author of numerous books of poetry, archæology, and history. He was still alive and flourishing when La Farge reached Paris, and his house was open to the young man from America. It was the house of a collector of paintings; the most famous artists and literary men met there; there was much comment and criticism in the air--much roaring of the lions. La Farge was in the midst of it. As he expressed it: “Art and literature were there at my hand, in rather an ancient form, but with the charm of the past, the eighteenth century, and the wonderful beginning of the nineteenth.”