The decoration of the interior is now almost completed, and, whether for good or for evil, it is irrevocable. It was not probable that so artistic a nation as the French would allow such a building to remain in an incomplete state; they would rather run the risk of perpetuating failure than leave the work undone. We English are different. S. Paul's is double the age of the Panthéon, and we are still squabbling over its decoration; we hang up designs and drag them down again, we lay out enormous sums in the embellishment of the altar, and then we spend ever so much more in trying to circumvent our neighbours, and get rid of the ornament. It is a fate not necessarily peculiar to our country or this city, because at Brompton a magnificent church has been designed, built, and decorated in a few years, a model of refinement, beauty, and grandeur. But the embellishment of S. Paul's is attempted by spurts only, and up to the present time has left much to be desired.[79] That may perhaps be an advantage; if nothing is done, there can be nothing to regret. But the French have acted otherwise, and the Panthéon embellishment is almost an accomplished fact. With one or two exceptions, the painting of the church has been confided to artists with reputations, wearers of the palm-embroidered coats; the procession of decorators being led by Baron Gros and Gérard, who covered the dome with pictures in the false, pretentious style of the First Empire, leaving it a glowing mass of bad taste, as a warning to their successors. Baron Gros was a great painter, an early naturalist, as witness his _Battlefield of Eylau_, in the Salle des Sept Cheminées of the Louvre. There is an amount of realism in the painting of the dying and the dead, of the snow and the "man of bronze," that is not surpassed by the realists of the day. But when he set to work upon Saints and Angels, he must fain idealise and sentimentalise; and so, instead of having a S. Geneviève in modest dress as befits a village maiden, we see a sprawling lady in flowing garments of silk and satin, receiving her guests of kings and queens in a cloudy apartment of the seventh heaven. The first, or one of the first walls attacked by the decorator was Alexander Cabanel's. Here we have the _Great works of S. Louis_ treated in the academic fashion. Learned in composition and refined in style, with a good deal of historical truth in costume and character, it is nevertheless crude and harsh in colour, unharmonious, stagey, and completely undecorative. The best of the panels is _S. Louis learning to read at his mother's knee_, which has a certain pathos in the fair child's expression.