The most signal triumph of French art has not been its influence on the continent of Europe but in England itself, where it has modified the tendencies of the existing school both in choice of subject and in technical execution. Through French influence English painting has been brought nearer to continental painting. At the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878 there was not that shock of surprise on passing from foreign sections to the British that seized the spectator in 1855. It is safe to predict that in 1889 the sense of strangeness will have still further diminished. [Sidenote: Absence of Narrowness in England.] The English are not narrow in opposition to French artistic influences. Rosa Bonheur’s reputation in England was made quite as easily as if she had been an Englishwoman. The French Gallery in London has extended the fame of many a foreign artist. Meissonier, Gérôme, Edouard Frère, are appreciated in London as in Paris. So it has been with the best French etchers, Méryon, Rajon, Waltner. [Sidenote: C. R. Leslie, R.A., on Continental Art.] [Sidenote: Haydon.] [Sidenote: Etty on French Painters.] Still, there exists or has existed amongst some Englishmen a prejudice against French art. The older Leslie was so patriotic as to believe that before the peace “the British school had possessed the wine and the other schools the water only of art, and that the peace, by mingling these, had strengthened the art of the continent exactly in the degree in which it had diluted art with us.” The French got the wine of art from England and mixed it with their water. Leslie thought too that it would be time enough for the French to talk of “high art” when they produced pictures that would bear even a distant comparison with the works of the great old masters, whereas those of a dozen English painters, _including Fuseli’s and the best of Haydon’s_, could “hang with credit amongst those of the greatest painters that ever lived.” Haydon himself said, “The present French artists have immense knowledge but their taste is bad, they know not how to avail themselves of what they know, how to marshal, order, and direct it.” Etty said of the French, “It is lamentable, the narrow nationality of their school; Titian, Correggio, Paolo, Rubens, throw down their pearls in vain. The husks of their own school are preferred.” In the five volumes of _Modern Painters_, modern French painters are treated as if they did not exist. [Sidenote: Advantage to Artists of belonging to weak States.]