_Bosio_ was the genuine product of this style. Every one of his pictures has become tedious, because of a spurious classicism to which he adhered with inflexible consistency. He cannot draw a grisette without seeing her with David's eyes. It deprives his figures of truth and interest. Something of the correctness of a schoolmistress is peculiar to them. His grace is too classic, his merriment too well-bred, and everything in them too carefully arranged to give the idea of scenes rapidly depicted from life. Beauty of line is offered in place of spontaneity of observation, and even the character of the drawing is lost in a pedantic elegance which envelopes everything with the uniformly graceful veil of an insipidly fluent outline. As soon as Romanticism had broken with the classic system, certain great draughtsmen, who laid a bold hand on modern life without being shackled by æsthetic formulæ, came to the front in France. _Henri Monnier_, the eldest of them, was born a year after the proclamation of the Empire. Cloaks, plumes, and sabretasches were the first impressions of his youth; he saw the return of triumphant armies and heard the fanfare of victorious trumpets. The Old Guard remained his ideal, the inglorious kingship of the Restoration his abhorrence. He was a supernumerary clerk in the Department of Justice when in 1828 his first brochure, _Moeurs administratives dessinées d'aprés nature par Henri Monnier_, disclosed to his superiors that the eyes of this poor young man in the service of the Ministry had seen more than they should have done. Dismissed from his post, he was obliged to support himself by his pencil, and became the chronicler of the epoch. In Monnier's prints breathes the happy Paris of the good old times, a Paris which in these days scarcely exists even in the provinces. His "Joseph Proudhomme," from his shoe-buckles to his stand-up collar, from his white cravat to his blue spectacles, is as immortal as _Eisele und Beisele_, _Schulze und Müller_, or Molière's _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_. Monnier himself is his own Proudhomme. He is the Philistine in Paris, enjoying little Parisian idylls with a _bourgeois_ complacency. With him there is no distinction between beautiful and ugly; he finds that everything in nature can be turned to account. How admirably the different worlds of Parisian society are discriminated in his _Quartiers de Paris_! How finely he has portrayed the grisette of the period, with her following of young tradesmen and poor students! As yet she has not blossomed into the fine lady, the luxurious _blasée_ woman of the next generation. She is still the bashful _modiste_ or dressmaker's apprentice whose outings in the country are described by Paul de Kock, a pretty child in a short skirt who lives in an attic and dresses up only when she goes to the theatre or into the country on a Sunday. Monnier gives her an air of good-nature, something delightfully childlike. In the society of her