Here France was at home, and felt it. The works of Dubray, Triquetti,
Yvon, Giraud, Gérôme, Dubufe, Toulmouche, Courbet, Troyon, Rosa
Bonheur and others exhibited the route toward the naturalistic
taken by her modern school, so different from that pursued by the
Pre-Raphaelites in England. The Düsseldorf school has been drawn into
the same path--France's one conquest from Prussia, who made at the
same time a stout struggle in defence of the classic manner through
Kaulbach. The drawings and paintings of art-students maintained by the
French government in Italy attested an enlightened liberality other
governments, general or local, would do well to imitate. The cost of
supporting a few score of pupils in Rome could in no way be better
bestowed for the promotion of commerce, manufactures and education.
Taste has unquestionably a high economic value. But this is only one
of France's ways of recognizing the fact. The government École des
Beaux Arts at Paris contained, in 1875, a hundred and seventy-two
students of architecture, a hundred and eighty-three of painting,
forty of sculpture and two hundred and fifty of engraving.

As a corollary to this assiduous culture, French art collectively was
at the exposition "first, and the rest nowhere." The old works sent
by Italy stood by themselves; and in mosaic, Salviati's glass, and
statuary led by Vela's _Last Moments of Napoleon_, the modern studios
of that country ranked in the front. Prussia had some heliographic
maps, then a new thing, and chromos, also in the bud; Austria and
England, fine architectural drawings; and Eastlake, Stanfield,
Landseer, Frith and Faed crossed pencils with the French. But nothing
modern of the kind could stand by the porcelain of Sèvres, the glass
of St. Louis and Baccarat, the bronzes of other French producers, the
vast collection of drawings of ancient and mediaeval monuments and