I remember an absurd instance enough of this deliberate mode of setting to work in a young French artist, who was copying the Titian’s _Mistress_ in the Louvre, some twenty years ago. After getting in his chalk-outline, one would think he might have been attracted to the face—that heaven of beauty (as it appears to some), clear, transparent, open, breathing freshness, that ‘makes a sunshine in the shady place’; or to the lustre of the golden hair; or some part of the poetry of the picture (for, with all its materiality, this picture has a poetry about it); instead of which he began to finish a square he had marked out in the right-hand corner of the picture, containing a piece of board and a bottle of some kind of ointment. He set to work like a cabinet-maker or an engraver, and appeared to have no sympathy with the soul of the picture. On a Frenchman (generally speaking), the distinction between the great and the little, the exquisite and the indifferent, is in a great measure lost: his self-satisfied egotism supplies whatever is wanting up to a certain point, and neutralizes whatever goes beyond it. Another young man, at the time I speak of, was for eleven weeks daily employed in making a black-lead pencil drawing of a small Leonardo: he sat with his legs balanced across a rail to do it, kept his hat on, every now and then consulted with his friends about his progress, rose up, went to the fire to warm himself, talked of the styles of the different masters—praising Titian _pour les coloris_, Raphael _pour l’expression_, Poussin _pour la composition_—all being alike to him, provided they had each something to help him on in his harangue (for that was all he thought about),—and then returned to _perfectionate_ (as he called it) his copy. This would drive an Englishman out of his senses, supposing him to be ever so stupid. The perseverance and the interruptions, the labour without impulse, the attention to the parts in succession, and disregard of the whole together, are to him utterly incomprehensible. He wants to do something striking, and bends all his thoughts and energies to one mighty effort. A Frenchman has no notion of this summary proceeding, exists mostly in his present sensations, and, if he is left at liberty to enjoy or trifle with these, cares about nothing farther, looking neither backwards nor forwards. They forgot the reign of terror under Robespierre in a month; they forgot that they had ever been called the _great nation_ under Buonaparte in a week. They sat in chairs on the Boulevards (just as they do at other times), when the shots were firing into the next street, and were only persuaded to quit them when their own soldiers were seen pouring down all the avenues from the heights of Montmartre, crying ‘_Sauve qui peut!_’ They then went home and dressed themselves to see the _Allies_ enter Paris, as a fine sight, just as they would witness a procession at a theatre. This is