and universities useless to a large number of the men who pass through them. "Now Venice, as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the most corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her strength the centre of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline the source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendor of the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation, and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the grave. "It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only, that effectual blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance. Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else." CONTRASTED PORTRAITS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE. In the last number of _The International_ we quoted the remarks of Lord Holland upon the character of the wife of Louis XVI. The sketch presented by the noble author has been the subject of much and various criticism. The London _Times_ says: "The virtue of the unfortunate consort of a most unhappy monarch is without a flaw. Enmity, hatred, and every evil passion, have done their worst to palliate murder and to blacken innocence, but the ineradicable spot cannot be fixed to the fair fame of this true woman. Faultless she was not. We are under no obligation to vindicate her imprudent, wilful, and fatal interference with public questions in which she had no concern; we say nothing of her ignorance of the high matters of state into which her uninformed zeal conducted her, to the bitter cost of herself and of those she loved dearest on earth; but of her purity, her uprightness, her beneficence, her devotion, her sweet, playful, happy disposition, in the midst of those home endearments, which were to her the true occupation and charm of life, there cannot exist a doubt. Misfortune fell upon her house to strengthen her love and to confirm her piety. Persecution, imprisonment, calamity that has never been surpassed, and a dreadful end, which, in its bitterness, has seldom been equalled, found and left her, a meek but perfect heroine. One historian has told us, that as 'an affectionate daughter and a faithful wife, she preserved in the two most corrupted courts of Europe the simplicity and affections of domestic life.' It is sufficient to add, that she ascended the scaffold enjoining her children to a scrupulous discharge of duty, to forgive her murderers, to forget her wrongs; and that her last words on earth were directed to the beloved husband who had preceded her, whose spirit she was eager to rejoin, yet whose bed, if we are to believe my Lord Holland, she had oftener than once defiled."