I am fond of my few French prints of the Eighteenth Century. It is easy to dispose of them (a common way in England)--the works, I mean, of all that Eighteenth Century School--by calling them light, trifling, even indiscreet in certain of their revelations of a life that seldom aimed to be austere; but, in reality, the prints of the ‘_Dix-Huitième_’ represent all phases of the thoughts and ways of French society--its deeds and its ideals--from the childhood of Louis Quinze to the Revolution; and, if you read French _contes_ and comedy, memoir and criticism, these things, from Watteau to Chardin, from Chardin to Fragonard, are their true illustrations. For myself, I do but mourn that I have so few of them: not a single Moreau, for instance--not the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra,’ with the love-letter conveyed in the nosegay, nor ‘C’est un Fils, Monsieur!’ in which a well-favoured young woman bounces into the library of the fortunate collector, with the news that he is also, as it seems, a parent. The insular pre-Raphaelite speaks of the French Eighteenth Century as ‘the bad period.’ It is ‘the bad period’ to people who are too rigid to grasp its grace. The narrowly learned, as Walter Savage Landor reminds us--‘the generality of the learned,’ he is even severe enough to say--‘are apt to conceive that in easy movement there is a want of solidity and strength.’ Now, ‘easy movement,’ spontaneous elegance, is the very characteristic of the Art of France, as it is of its delightful people; and not to recognise, not to enjoy that, is merely to be under the sway of pedantry, antiquarian or academic. French Eighteenth Century Art, like Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century, like the Art of Titian and of Velasquez, reflected Life--much of the charm of Life--and unless it be that Life itself and Beauty have no interest for us, we cannot afford to pass that Art superciliously by.