The picture is enhanced by the bright verdure of the Tuileries gardens; by the gay, swift passage of boats; by all the sparkling diversities of Parisian life which fill the streets with so much colour and charm. When you have crossed the Pont des Beaux Arts, on which I have kept you standing awhile, you will enter the school by the busy, old-fashioned, almost provincial Rue Bonaparte. What a pleasant place it is to be sure, this modern school of art! Here it is that the famous Prix de Rome is given, which sends hopeful youths to the very fount and cradle of art for its instruction and gratification, but not infrequently for the careful destruction of all individuality of sprouting genius in thrall to academic rule. It is the rigidity of this academic rule in France which produces such explosions of anarchy in literature and art. Precision and clarity are such essential characteristics of the genius of the race that, when turbulent youth in a tempest of revolt against the discipline of the implacable academies decides to fling its cap over the mill, and carve out its own fresh road to the devil, we are shocked by eccentricities that elsewhere would leave us unmoved. If youth must occasionally go mad, at least we demand that French youth shall go mad with sanity of taste and judgment. His Anglo-Saxon brother in a like predicament may be as imprecise, as vague and obscure, as racial character and the genius of his language permit, but we exact of this raging Gaul that his insanity shall be beautifully measured by the canons of art. And so his excesses in anarchy appear to our judgment far more grievous crimes against taste and tact than those of less intellectually and artistically disciplined races. When he falls away from the lines of beauty his defection is more deplorable than another’s. We are accustomed to count upon him as a model of elegance in all the finer paths of pleasure; and when he dips into crabbed prose or rude verse, or paints us, as a symphony of modern morals, a naked woman playing the piano, with a fashionable hat on a vulgarly dressed head, we resent the hideous joke as evidence of unjustifiable lawlessness. The Prix de Rome may have something to do with these outbreaks. The best art of the world has been spontaneous and not academic; and though we may admit that training is a priceless advantage in all paths, the individual influence of one master of his craft is far above that of all the academies ever formed. The French in all things depend too exclusively on institutions. They tired of the tyranny of Throne and Church, and overthrew the one and shook the altars of the other. But the abiding tyranny of institutions they unmurmuringly accept and submit to as their substitution. Louis XIV. and Napoleon ruled the people with a rod of iron; each combined in his personal prestige and power all the resources of the various institutions which, united, now represent the authority of a single man.