the _Seven Sacraments_, an immense composition that, for grandeur of thought, can vie with the _Stanze_ of Raphael. I speak of it from the engravings; for the _Seven Sacraments_ are no longer in France. Eternal shame of the eighteenth century! It was at least necessary to wrest from the Greeks the pediments of the Parthenon,--we, we delivered up to strangers, we sold all those monuments of French genius which Richelieu and Mazarin, with religious care, had collected. Public indignation did not avert the act! And there has not since been found in France a king, a statesman, to interdict letting the master-pieces of art that honor the nation depart without authorization from the national territory![138] There has not been found a government which has undertaken at least to repurchase those that we have lost, to get back again the great works of Poussin, Lesueur, and so many others, scattered in Europe, instead of squandering millions to acquire the baboons of Holland, as Louis XIV. said, or Spanish canvasses, in truth of an admirable color, but without nobleness and moral expression.[139] I know and I love the Dutch pastorals and the cows of Potter; I am not insensible to the sombre and ardent coloring of Zurbaran, to the brilliant Italian imitations of Murillo and Velasquez; but in fine, what is all that in comparison with serious and powerful compositions like the _Seven Sacraments_, for example, that profound representation of Christian rites, a work of the highest faculties of the intellect and the soul, in which the intellect and the soul will ever find an exhaustless subject of study and meditation! Thank God, the graver of Pesne has saved them from our ingratitude and barbarity. Whilst the originals decorate the gallery of a great English lord,[140] the love and the talent of a Pesne, of a Stella, have preserved for us faithful copies in those expressive engravings that one never grows tired of contemplating, that every time we examine them, reveal to us some new side of the genius of our great countryman. Regard especially the _Extreme Unction!_ What a sublime and at the same time almost graceful scene! One would call it an antique bas-relief, so many groups are properly distributed in it, with natural and varied attitudes. The draperies are as admirable as those of a fragment of the _Panathenaea_, which is in the Louvre. The figures are all beautiful. Beauty of figures belongs to sculpture, one is about to say:--yes, but it also belongs to painting, if you have yourself the eye of the painter, if you have been struck with the expression of those postures, those heads, those gestures, and almost those looks; for every thing lives, every thing breathes, even in those engravings, and if it were the place, we would endeavor to make the reader penetrate with us into those secrets of Christian sentiment which are also the secrets of art.