The Musee of Paris, in 1844, contained upwards of fifteen hundred pictures. According to the catalogue compiled in 1781, the Imperial Gallery of Vienna then contained twelve hundred and thirty-four. According to the catalogue of 1839, the Dresden gallery contained eighteen hundred and fifty-seven. At Munich, the present king has erected a spacious building, into which he has draughted a selection, from among several thousands, of about fifteen hundred. And what have we done to improve the national taste? And strange, indeed, does it appear, that whenever such a subject is brought before the public mind in Parliament, it is solely with a view to the connexion of art with manufactures. There must be in the nature of things a certain connexion; but unnecessarily to bind them in union is to bind then unnaturally, and to put the shackles upon the higher, which cannot bear them without degradation. We hail with great pleasure every publication whose object is to promote a love for the fine arts; and more particularly those which show a due reverence for the old masters; for, however unwilling we may be to limit the power of genius, no one who has any pretensions to taste, and is of a cultivated mind, will deny that, if their works are not perfection, they are at least in a right direction. The novelties which more modern art has sought will pass away, we are persuaded, as not founded upon true principles, and we shall best advance by properly appreciating what has been done before us. We will not here enter into the subject of the _decadence_ of art, nor its causes. We believe that if adequate national and provincial galleries were formed, more especially at our universities, the improved public taste would create a demand which this country would not lack genius to supply. We are not in the exact condition of Italy at the sudden rise of art there. The public, in the days of Raffaelle and Michael Angelo, had nothing, or but little _to unlearn_; the previous aim had fortunately not been very multifarious; the sentiment of art was right, and the direction true. It remained only to enlarge the sphere; the principles were in being; they required but confirmation. Grace and power naturally arose; for there was no counteracting education, nothing positively bad altogether to lay aside, though there was something to correct. Now with us, on the contrary, art has run into very strange vagaries; the enlargement of the boundaries has been unlimited, but it has been in regions far below the Parnassian Mount. We have talked of the High Ideal, and practised and encouraged _ad infinitum_ the Low Natural, and too often have descended to the worse, the Low Unnatural; so that, upon the whole, we have to unlearn very much before we can be said to be in the rudiments of Real Art. Let us suppose one born with every natural endowment, with imagination, and a power of imitation. The mind, after all, is fed with _realities_; there is in it also process