A two-fold study of absorbing interest to the artistic mind may be prosecuted in the Louvre--the development of the modern Romantic school of French painters from Gericault's famous Raft of the Medusa, painted in 1819, through the works of Delacroix and Delaroche; and the revival of landscape painting, under the stimulus of the English artists Bonnington and Constable, by Rousseau (1812-1867), the all-father of the modern French landscape school, and the little band of enthusiasts that grouped themselves around him at Barbizon. Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, Troyon and the grand and solemn Millet, once despised and rejected of men, have now won fame and appreciation. No princely patronage shone upon them nor smoothed their path; they wrought out the beauty of their souls under the hard discipline of poverty and in loving and awful communion with nature. They have revealed to the modern world new tones of colour in the air and the forest and the plain, and a new sense of the pathos and beauty in simple lives and common things. The artistic treasures we have thus briefly and summarily reviewed form but a part of the inestimable possessions of the Louvre. Collections of drawings; ivories; reliquaries and sanctuary vessels; pottery; jewellery; furniture (among which is the famous _bureau du roi_, the most wonderful piece of cabinet work in Europe); bronzes; Greek, Egyptian, Assyrian, Chaldean and Persian antiquities (including the unique and magnificent frieze of the archers from the palace of Darius I.), all are crowded with objects of interest and beauty, even to the inexpert visitor. Of the gorgeous palace of the Tuileries, with its inharmonious but picturesque façade, stretching across the western limit of the Louvre from the Pavilion de Flore to the Pavilion de Marsan, not one stone is left on another. We remember it after its fiery purgation by the Commune in 1871, a gaunt shell blackened and ruined, fitting emblem of the wreck which the enthroned wantonness and corruption of the Second Empire had made of France. [Illustration: GRACE BEFORE MEAT. CHARDIN.] [Illustration: MADAME RECAMIER. DAVID.]