France is a great city, and the name of this city is Paris. Here, and not in the provinces, lives that fashionable, thinking world which has become the guide of the nation and the censor of beauty, by the refinement of its taste and its preeminent intellect. The ideas which fly throughout the land upon invisible wires are born in Paris. Painting, likewise, receives them at first hand. It stands amid the seething whirlpool of the age, the heart's-blood of the present streams through all its veins, and there is nothing human that is alien to it, neither the filth nor the splendour of life, its laughter nor its misery. All the nerves of the great city are vibrating in it. Paris has made her people refined and, at the same time, insatiate in enjoyment. Every day they have need of new impressions and new theories to ward off tedium. And thus is explained the universally comprehensive sphere of subject in French painting, and its feverish versatility in technique. But London has, in no sense, the importance for England which Paris has for France. It is a centre of attraction for business; but the more refined classes of society live in the country. As soon as one is off in the Dover express country houses fly past on either side of the train. They are all over England--upon the shores of the lakes, upon the strand of the sea, upon the tops of the hills. And how pleasant they are, how well appointed, how delightful to look at, with their gabled roofs and their gleaming brickwork overgrown with ivy! Around them stretches a fresh lawn which is rolled every morning, as soft as velvet. Fat oxen, and sheep as white as if they had been just washed, lie upon the grass. Thus all rustic England is like a great summer resort, where there is heard no sound of the ringing and throbbing strokes of life. Nor is painting allowed to disturb this idyllic harmony. No one wishes that anything should remind him of the prose of life when his work is done and the town has vanished. Schiller's assertion, "Life is earnest, blithe is art," is here the first law of æesthetics. [Illustration: _Mag. of Art._ LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A.]