There are some examples of "high art," such as _The Pope and the Emperor of Germany at Canossa in 1077_, by M. Cluysenaar, a composition as cold as it is vast; some illustrations of the national history by M. Wauters, who reminds us, in some respects, of the great French painter Laurens, though lacking his power; and there are the historico-religious pictures of M. Verlat. But much the best things in the Belgian collection are the numerous works of a painter whose aims are not so high, and who in Brussels seems like an exile from Paris. M. Alfred Stevens draws his inspiration from fashionable life; and no Parisian could surpass the execution of his velvets and laces and the thousand new stuffs which Fashion invents every year--_gants de Suède_, and faces too of a certain type, the pretty _chiffonnées_ faces of girls of every rank in life. But the pretty faces are, after all, mere accessories in a picture where the principals are the hat and the dress and the parasol, upon which, as any one can see, the artist has bestowed all his loving care. Nothing of his, however, in the Exposition can compare with his _Young Mother_, which I saw last year in the Academy at Philadelphia. Next after Stevens, in point of reputation, comes M. Willems, who really belongs to the French school of Gérôme, but who feels himself under obligation, in his character of Fleming, to paint nothing but what Terburg and Metzu painted two centuries before him. The man without a plumed hat and big boots and a great sword at his side has, for M. Willems, no existence. I would not say that he does not paint hat, boots and sword as well as the old Flemish masters themselves did, but while they drew from the life he paints at second hand, and the modern artist who passes his days in the vain effort to revivify the models of his predecessors will always rank below the masters whom he imitates, as M. Willems does, with so many others whom a false public taste encourages in a hopeless pursuit. There are no landscapes in the Belgian section, if one may be allowed to except the _marines_ of M. Clays, and yet Belgium can boast of at least one excellent _paysagiste_, M. César de Cock, who, unfortunately, is not represented in the Exposition.