full of remembrances of ancient history studied in the gymnasium, liken to the Lyceum and the Porch. In every case ancient Rome is set up as the exemplar. The Parisian collection of engravings on copper possesses a reproduction of the guillotine, with the inscription: _A similar machine was used for the execution of the Roman, Titus Manlius_. A valet committed suicide, and quoted the illustrious example of Seneca. Had it been possible, people would have gladly thrown themselves back eighteen hundred years into the past, with all its grandeur, its simplicity, and its ruthlessness. Political and social forms did not suffice; even the implements and costume of the ancients were again brought into honour. Furniture put on antiquarian shapes; the walls were decorated _à la Grecque_. The lively frivolity of _rococo_, with its freaks and fancies, was no longer adapted to the boudoir of the age of revolution, now transformed into the political council-room. Twists and curves were no longer permitted: everything had to be straightforward, logical, ungenerous, inexorable. Men went clad wretchedly, with red Phrygian caps and no breeches. Women and girls cast aside their ordinary attire and put on straight, falling drapery, discarded their heeled shoes and bound sandals round their feet, shook the powder from their locks and tied their hair in a Greek knot. "Dressed in white raiment without adornment, but decked in the virtue of simplicity," they appeared in the cabinet of the president, in order to surrender their jewels for the salvation of their country, like those Roman matrons in the time of Camillus. And, in co-operation with the building up of this new world, painting also advanced. It was only when it assisted to arouse civic virtue, it was said at a sitting of the jury at the Salon of 1793, that painting could possess a right to exist in the new state, and as the handmaid of this patriotism might fulfil an even higher mission than it had done in ancient Greece and Rome. "The Greeks and Romans were indeed only slaves, but we French are by nature free, philosophers in character, virtuous in our every perception, and artists through our taste." In proportion as the French Republic transcended the old free states, so too must French art take the lead of the antique. "All that stimulated art in Greece, the gymnastic exercises, the public games, the national festivals, is also accessible to the French, who possess above all that which the Greeks lacked, the feeling for true liberty. To depict the history of a free people is indeed quite another mission for the true genius than to embody scenes out of mythology."