adorers she is content with the cheapest pleasures, drinks cider and eats cakes, rides on a donkey or breakfasts amid the trees, and hardly coquets at all when a fat old gentleman follows her on the boulevards. These innocent flirtations remind one as little of the more recent _lorettes_ of Gavarni as these in their turn anticipate the drunken street-walkers of Rops. [Illustration: _L'Art._ DAUMIER. THE CONNOISSEURS.] Under Louis Philippe began the true modern period of French caricature, the flourishing time when really great artists devoted themselves to it. It never raised its head more proudly than under the _bourgeois_ king, whose onion head always served the relentless Philippon as a target for his wit. It was never armed in more formidable fashion; it never dealt more terrible blows. Charles Philippon's famous journal _La Caricature_ was the most powerful lever that the republicans used against the "July government"; it was equally feared by the Ministry, the _bourgeoisie_, and the throne. When the _Charivari_ followed _La Caricature_ in 1832, political cartoons began to give way to the simple portraiture of manners in French life. The powder made for heavy guns exploded in a facile play of fireworks improvised for the occasion. French society in the nineteenth century has to thank principally _Daumier_ and _Gavarni_ for being brought gradually within the sphere of artistic representation. These men are usually called caricaturists, yet they were in reality the great historians of their age. Through long years they laboured every week and almost every day at their great history, which embraced thousands of chapters--at a true zoology of the human species; and their work, drawn upon stone in black and white, proves them not merely genuine historians, but really eminent artists who merit a place beside the greatest. [Illustration: _L'Art._ DAUMIER. THE MOUNTEBANKS. (_By permission of M. Eugène Montrosier, the owner of the picture._)]