It is the "Memorial Hall" of the Champ de Mars--the Gallery of Fine Arts which there takes the place of the familiar building in Fairmount Park--that has decided the really great success of the Exposition of 1878. The unanimous verdict of popular admiration was given at Philadelphia to the machinery: in Paris it is as strongly pronounced in favor of the fine arts. Paris is, indisputably, the capital of modern art, and her title to this proud distinction is to-day confirmed by the assembled peoples with all the solemnity and authority of a universal congress. I have, like all visitors no doubt, yielded to the seductive spell of this magnificent collection of objects of art, to which two worlds have contributed, and under the influence of the keen and exalted enjoyment of the first few days I should have found it impossible to qualify by a single censure the expression of my admiration. But after a short retirement in the country, where I allowed my mind to lie fallow, I found that I could revisit the galleries of the Champ de Mars with more judgment and method, and that the beauties of the first order, which I admired as much as ever, no longer made me blind to the defects and the weak points of certain parts. First of all, it must be admitted that the Exhibition of this year is not equal to that of 1855; and this is no more than was to be expected, when one remembers that the latter had brought together the scattered masterpieces of the long period of half a century--a period illustrated by such names as Ingres, Delacroix, Decamps and others. This splendid assemblage of so many important works could not be repeated in 1867; and at that time there were unmistakable indications that a new artistic current had set in, and we saw the first rays of the coming glory of the painter of genre and of landscape--the triumph of Meissonier, of Gérôme, of Théodore Rousseau, of Corot.