The =Salle de Rude= contains plastic work of the Restoration, the July Monarchy, and the Second Empire. It answers roughly to the romantic School of Delaroche in painting. Several of these almost contemporary works have high merit, though few of them aim at that reposeful expression which is proper to sculpture. Some, indeed, trench upon the domain of painting in their eager effort to express passing emotion and action. Picturesqueness and sensuousness are their prevailing features. Nevertheless, the room, as a whole, exhibits the character of a real renaissance, such as it is, from the mediocrity of the last century, and the bleak propriety of the classical revival. Too many of the works, however, are aimed at the taste of the Boulevards. They foreshadow that feeling which makes too much modern sculpture attempt to catch the public by flinging away everything that is proper to the art. The desire for novelty is allowed to override the sense of beauty and of just proportion: repose is lost; dignity and serenity give place to cleverness of imitation and apt catching at the momentary expression. III. THE SMALLER COLLECTIONS. The =other collections= at the Louvre appeal for the most part rather to the =specialist= than to the general public. They are for workers, not for sight-seers. The =Egyptian Museum=, for example, to the L as you enter the Cour du Louvre by the main entrance, contains, perhaps, the finest collection of its sort in all Europe. You must, of course, at least walk through it—especially if you have not seen the British Museum. The objects, however, are sufficiently indicated for casual visitors by means of the labels; they need not be enumerated. The opposite wing, to the R as you enter, contains the =Assyrian Collection=, inferior on the whole, especially in its bas-reliefs, to that in the British Museum. Beyond it, again, to the left, lie a group of rooms devoted to the =intermediate region= between the sphere of =Assyrian and Greek art=. These rooms ought certainly to be examined by any who wish to form some idea of the origin and development of Hellenic culture. The first two rooms of the suite contain =Phœnician= works,—important because the Phœnicians were the precursors of the Greeks in navigation and commerce in the Mediterranean, and because early Greek art was largely based on Phœnician imitations of Assyrian and Egyptian work, or on actual Egyptian and Assyrian objects imported into Hellas by Phœnician merchants. These Semitic seafarers had no indigenous art of their own; but they acted as brokers between East and West, and they skilfully copied and imitated the principal art-products of the two great civilisations on whose confines they lay, though often without really understanding their true import. The Phœnicians were thus the pioneers of civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean.