Some pardonable petulance was shown at the time, as described by Lord Castlereagh, who writes thus on the 21st Sept. :

The spoliation of the Louvre is begun. The King of the Netherlands is hard at work; Austria begins immediately; and I believe the three Powers-that is, Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain-if called upon by the Pope's Commissioner, Canova, will unite to enable him to remove his master's property. The Emperor of Russia will not, I hope, take any further part in opposition to the sentiments of his allies. The French, of all parties, are very sore, and they were foolish enough, at Madame de Duras', the other night, to resent it to the Duke of Wellington in the most pointed manner; but we are going straight forward.'-Vol. xi. p. 167.

We pass over now the painful time when working parties' relieved each other in the strange duties, the sounds of which reverberated through those proud halls; when long spaces of dirty blue wall daily increased in size; when travellers, hastening over, chiefly from England, arrived only in time to see the 'Transfiguration' in the act of being lowered; when pictures which, for the first time since leaving the same studio, had hung side by side, now parted to meet no more; when, in the words of the author of 'Paris Revisited,' the Louvre took the melancholy, confused, desolate air of a large auction-room after a day's sale; and yet when a Frenchman, even in the midst of his sorrow, had his pithy joke, saying, as he pointed to the empty frames strewing the floors, Nous ne leur aurions pas laissés même les

cadres.'

Various reasons have been alleged for the retention of the great 'Marriage of Cana,' by Paul Veronese, in the Tribune, and principally that it was impossible to detach it from the walls, and that it was too vast and too dilapidated to bear a second journey. The last was doubtless the truer cause. The really disgraceful part of the transaction was that the Austrians readily accepted a picture by Lebrun, in return for one of the most important examples, in every sense, of the Venetian school. No one will grudge the French this victory over the stolid Viennese envoy; but when the Venetians reckon up their insults and injuries from their German rulers, this pretended exchange may well take a place among them.

It has been stated that the lists of objects to be reclaimed were, especially on the part of the Italians, made out with so little attention that a considerable number of valuable items were omitted. This was, to a certain extent, true; but there was method in the omissions, and small blame to the French for profiting by them. All the so-called 'primitive schools,' then deemed barbarous, but including many pictures now recognised as some of the choicest

ornaments of the Louvre, were, from contempt, or grudging of expense of transport, left behind. Such works as the Coronation of the Virgin,' by Fra Angelico; the 'Madonna della Vittoria' and the Crucifixion,' by Mantegna; the 'Visitation,' by Ghirlandajo; the 'Virgin and Saints,' by Fra Filippo Lippi; and all the pictures by Perugino, were abandoned by their ungrateful owners to the ci-devant conquerors without even the grace of a gift. Not that the French of the day were particularly grateful. That they knew little of the value of these precious objects is proved by the readiness with which they had presented many of this class to the provincial museums. This is why we see the fine works by Mantegna at Tours, and why specimens of Perugino-some of them of the finest quality-may be found in such places as Caen, Toulouse, Nancy, Marseilles, Lyons, and other country collections. Once there they were doubly forgotten.

The removal of the sculpture began later, and occupied a longer time. With the love for sculpture, real and artificial, traditional in the Gallic race, and revived by David's pictures and the 'coiffure à l'antique,' the French took this part of their loss more to heart than that of the pictures. Walter Scott says that as the time approached for the dethroning of such statues as the Venus, the Apollo, the Discobolus, &c., from their pedestals, the people talked to them, knelt to them, wept to them, and bade them adieu, as if they were, indeed, restored to the rank of idols.

It would be interesting, if we had space, to follow the exiles to their homes again. Suffice it to say that in most places they were received with fêtes; and, especially in Antwerp and Bologna, were publicly exhibited to a generation who had grown up without them. Bologna forbore to return them to the treacherous keeping of the Church, and the gallery there owes its formation to that time.

As for the deserted walls of the Louvre, no nation was better able than the French worthily to cover them again. Pictures of interest, which had retired before the late noble guests, were restored to their places. The royal palaces rendered up a still further supply of forgotten treasures. The series by Rubens, originally from the Luxembourg, with the Le Sueurs, the Vernets, and a number of excellent French pictures which had belonged to ancient Paris churches, helped to fill up gaps; and, with the glories of 'l'ancienne collection,' no less than 1113 pictures were soon displayed on the walls. To these Louis XVIII. added by purchase 111 works; Charles X. twenty-four more; and Louis Philippe, while creating the gorgeous galleries 'à toutes les

gloires

gloires de la France,' at Versailles, at an expense little short of half a million, from his own purse, contributed thirty-three pictures to the Louvre.

more

Meanwhile it is difficult now to realise the fact that, with all the real accommodation of this enormous palace, and the boasted better management of the French in such matters, the exhibition of modern painters annually hid the old masters from sight, and inflicted upon them grievous injuries, down to so late a date as 1849. It would seem, indeed, as if republics were enlightened in their estimate of such treasures than other forms of government, for, with the new powers of 1848, a greatly improved arrangement of the gallery took place. The first edition of the admirable catalogue by M. Villot, from the thirteenth edition of which we have borrowed so largely, was given to the public; and, above all, the periodical eclipse of the old constellations by the grosser bodies of modern creation was entirely abolished.

Here our task must cease. The present Administration has been alternately stingy and extravagant. A Murillo has been purchased at the price of a gallery; and an indifferent gallery as regards pictures-the Campana-has swallowed up the average art resources of a long reign. To the last also we find the history of the collections running parallel with that of the country in general. In 1848 they became again the property of the people; now, following the course of events, they have been claimed as the appanage of the Crown. But if a despotic sovereign has made the price and the choice of works of art subservient to his own policy, he has given them, in the completion of the building of the Louvre, a framework which is the admiration of the world. As far, however, as regards the accommodation of pictures, it is by no means so perfect as could be wished. Let us hope that in this respect the English nation may yet boast a better Louvre of their own.

ART. II.-1. Caractères et Portraits Littéraires du XVI. Siècle. Par M. Léon Feugère. Second Edition. 2 tomes. Paris, 1864. 2. Histoire du Livre en France. Par Edmond Werdet. 3e partie, tome 1er. Les Estienne et leurs Devanciers depuis 1470. Paris, 1864.

ENRI ESTIENNE, on his death in 1598, found no one in the circle of his family or friends to record his personal adventures, or to enumerate, in even the barest memoir, his learned labours. Not till near a century afterwards did the

literary

literary history of the sixteenth century become the object of curiosity; and this not in France itself. Catholic France, divided between dreams of military glory without and theological dispute within, had no leisure for its own history. The taste and temper of the age of Louis XIV. were as alien from those of France of the sixteenth century as if they had belonged to two different peoples and countries. The memory of its great Protestant worthies was left to be cultivated by the refugees in England, Prussia, or the Low Countries. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes exiled not only the best living heads and hands of France, but all the associations and traditions of the sixteenth century with them.

The Stephenses (Fr. Estienne) found their first biographer in Theodore Janssen ab Almeloveen. The Latin dissertation 'De Vitis Stephanorum' of this laborious Dutch compiler was published at Amsterdam in 1683. Almeloveen had no traditional materials or family papers, and worked merely from printed sources. But it so happens that in the case of Henri Estienne these printed memoranda are more than usually abundant. During threescore and two years of restless, nay, feverish activity, Henri's press had never ceased to issue a stream of publications classical or fugitive, all superintended by himself, many his own composition. Few of these want a Preface, Dedication, Preliminary Epistle, or Monition of the publisher, in which the feelings of the hour, his own affairs, his reasons for writing, or what had hindered him from writing, are poured forth with a garrulous egotism which is anything but eloquent or refined. But what these confidences want in taste they offer in genuineness. And being but occasional outbursts, they offer glimpses of a personal history which they do not reveal. They are the very material which at once attract and baffle a biographer.

After an interval of twenty-five years the same mine was worked with more perseverance and on a more extensive scale by Michel Maittaire, a French Protestant refugee, naturalised in England, whose original name had been Mettayer. But though Maittaire had himself suffered for religion, he knew scarcely anything of the religious antecedents of the Protestant Church. It is enough to mention two facts:-1. Maittaire brought out an edition of the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum' as the serious productions of their imputed authors; and 2. In his Lives of the Stephenses he supposes Henri's books with the olive' to have been printed at Paris,-a blunder almost incredible in a bibliographer, though Maittaire has been followed in it by the compilers of the last-printed Bodleian Catalogue.

6

Passing over Mr. Gresswell's Parisian Greek Press,' which

is only an abstract of Maittaire, we come to the first work which the French dedicated to this truly national subject. The Annales de l'Imprimerie des Estienne,' in its second and improved edition, (Paris, 1843), if not exactly a model of bibliophilic accuracy, is yet, perhaps, one of the best specimens of this kind of industry which France has to show. But there was wanting a review of the higher learning in France during the sixteenth century: a field entirely forsaken by the French critics, who have been so profuse in disserting upon the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

With this view the Académie Française proposed for the year 1854, as one of their prize subjects a 'Life of Henri Estienne.' The production of M. Feugère, which is now reprinted by him in the collected volumes of his Essays which we have placed at the head of this paper, was thought deserving of the prize. As such, it is necessarily a neat piece of composition. And this is all that can be said of it. M. Feugère is indebted, almost wholly, to Rénouard's 'Annales' for his facts. He omits many, tells the rest more diffusely, and interweaves the ordinary reflections of a man of sense and some reading, but of no special intimacy with the period. We shall show below, in one signal instance, that he has not even looked beyond the title-page of some books of which he yet offers a detailed criticism. But M. Feugère's most decisive disqualification for historiographer of the Estienne is his imperfect knowledge of Greek. When M. Rénouard tells us that Jos. Scaliger ne voyoit pas sans dépit la supériorité de Henri Etienne,' we smile at the sincerity with which the estimable printer utters this absurdity. When M. Feugère, however, in an essay which has received the high sanction of the Académie Française, is equally unable to discriminate between white and black in classical philology, we are forcibly reminded of the absence of the highest element of cultivation from the education of the leading nation of Europe. If the French Academy regard the production of a good French exercise as the object of their annual competition, they are right in conferring the crown on such essays as this of M. Feugère. As tending to maintain historical criticism in France at its present superficial level, it can but be matter of regret that the Academy should sanction with its approbation so feeble and secondhand a reproduction.

If the decision be a bad one, the thesis was an excellent one to set. A brief outline of the fortunes of the Press of the Stephenses may serve to show what vital points of the national life are inwolved in the subject proposed by the Academy 'In narrating

the