All this time the eyes of the enthusiast have been wandering to a corner of the chamber where an artist is copying a small _Rembrandt_. It is not the _Rembrandt_ he is regarding, but the artist. How excessively nice! The most charming young lady perched on a pair of steps, like a dear little bird in a tree. She bends over her work and draws her head back, and scans the effect on one side and the other with, really, the most irritating picturesqueness. She wears a blue robe just the colour of her eyes, with a little ermine tippet, and when an ancient dragon, who is reading a novel at the foot of the steps, in a cloak and ugly bonnet, speaks to her, she laughs and shakes her blond _chevelure_, and is so delightful altogether, that it is quite impossible to attend to the pictures. Let us go into the long gallery where the students are not so fascinating. Dirty, long-haired, and bearded men in blouses, and females in seedy crumpled black, look up as we pass by from their easels. An English family runs past with the blue catalogues in their hands. A precious bore the whole affair is to them. They must be quick, there is no time to lose. "What a lot of pictures! Isn't that a funny man with a beard? How slippery the floor is! RUBENS, ah, really. Come, girls, we must get back to MEWREISE'S to lunch. There's the Bose Arts, and the Museum of Artillery, and the Bois de Bullown"--"You should say Bulloyne, Pa"--"to be done before dinner." A long vista of pictures ordered, as all galleries should be, chronologically. As you enter, mystical compositions, or rather apparitions of draped angels and saints gaze at you with sleepy eyes from firmaments of gold. Their limbs are long and gaunt; their looks grimly devout, and their heads are set awry on their shoulders. Is it credible that there should be educated men in the present day who yearn after these barbarisms, and have no sympathy with the struggles made by subsequent artists to get free from their influence? And that clergymen should put up copies of the same in our churches, and almost anathematise as heathens those who prefer better drawing? This period is the very winter of art, and the next is the spring, all life and freshness and beauty. We cannot but here remember the young painters in England who have borrowed a name, if not a principle, from the times before RAPHAEL. Already their works have become the great point of attraction in the Royal Academy; already they have reaped the success of enthusiastic praise, and the still rarer and more precious success of rancorous abuse. What does our friend ORTOLAN say on this subject?