Can there he a more pleasing walk in the whole world than a stroll through the Gallery of the Louvre on a fête-day? not to look so much at the pictures as at the lookers-on. Thousands of the poorer classes are there: mechanics in their Sunday clothes, smiling grisettes, smart dapper soldiers of the line, with bronzed wondering faces, marching together in little companies of six or seven, and stopping every now and then at Napoleon or Leonidas as they appear in proper vulgar heroics in the pictures of David or Gros. The taste of these people will hardly be approved by the connoisseur, but they have _a_ taste for art. Can the same be said of our lower classes, who, if they are inclined to be sociable and amused in their holidays, have no place of resort but the taproom or tea-garden, and no food for conversation except such as can be built upon the politics or the police reports of the last Sunday paper? So much has Church and State puritanism done for us--so well has it succeeded in materialising and binding down to the earth the imagination of men, for which God has made another world (which certain statesmen take but too little into account)--that fair and beautiful world of art, in which there _can_ be nothing selfish or sordid, of which Dulness has forgotten the existence, and which Bigotry has endeavoured to shut out from sight-- ‘On a banni les démons et les fées, Le raisonner tristement s’accrédite: On court, hélas! après la vérité: Ah! croyez-moi, l’erreur a son mérite!’