The enthusiasm on the departure of the troops which went out on the expedition to that island was so scant that it was evident that, had disaster awaited them, similar to that which occurred to the forces in Tonkin, the ministers considered responsible would have experienced M. Jules Ferry's unpopularity. As it was, the hardships suffered on the route during that ill-organised expedition caused considerable popular feeling, as the army, as at present organised, is not a professional corps, the whole nation passing through its ranks. France with all her wealth could not afford to lose the productive labour of over 300,000 of her youth annually for three years, which would mean a perpetual drain of a million young men. The proportion of exemptions differs from year to year. This year, for example (of which we shall not have the official returns for a long while to come), it is said that the authorities have been unusually severe; the average, however, seems to be about forty per cent. The men excused from service include those who have legal right of exemption as being the support of their families, and those afflicted with physical infirmity. The statistics on this subject are an example of the danger of the study of that class of literature when unsupported by independent knowledge of the subject, as the official figures (for example, in 1892, when, out of 343,000 recruits, 108,000 were rejected for physical unfitness) would give the impression that France was becoming a nation of invalids and cripples, whereas a very slight bodily or constitutional imperfection will exempt from service. Moreover, a large number of those who are accepted have to serve only one year instead of three by reason of their belonging to certain professions, or of having passed certain examinations, or of fulfilling other conditions which accord this partial exemption. Yet when all these palliations are taken into account, it is a terrible tax on the resources of the nation. To say that the military service is accepted cheerfully would be misleading, but it is submitted to without much complaint, and here we have that amazing phase of modern democracy, universal suffrage giving its sanction to universal military service. The ethical effect of so great a proportion of the nation passing through the ranks of the army is too complicated a subject to be treated cursorily. It may be said, however, that though France is a nation of soldiers, it is not a nation of bellicose warriors, and if the country had to declare for peace or war, the fact that every family in the land has to contribute its fighting contingent would secure peace in

perpetuity. Unfortunately, whenever France is involved in war, the country will have had as little to say to it as in the days of undemocratic government. It will be decided at Paris, perhaps on orders from St. Petersburg, and no doubt the boulevards will be as delirious as they were in July 1870, while a section of the Parisian population shouts in the name of the peaceable French nation.

With international complications we do not intend here to deal. The interior condition of France may, however, have a very decided bearing on them in the near future, and our task has been, by tracing the history of the government of that country since the last great European war, and by glancing at some of the results of a quarter of a century of Republican régime, to make clear what are the chief features in the actual situation of our neighbours. There seems to be a complete failure, beyond remedy, of the Parliamentary system, with no alternate régime supported in the country, the State being saved from anarchy by the strong machinery of centralised government which survives not only ministries and parliaments, but revolutions and dynasties. Then there is the nation, as regards the vast majority of its members, peaceable, industrious, indifferent to politics; and then, formed of the manhood of this nation, there is one of the most gigantic armed forces the world has ever seen. What will be the result of this combination in the declining days of the nineteenth century? Will the centralised machine be strong enough to resist the disarray of governmental anarchy? Will the thrift and labour of the people be sufficient to make up for the extravagance of the incompetent exponents of the Parliamentary system? Will some feeble combination of politicians, flattered in their Republican vanity by the interested alliance of an autocratic power, put at its disposal the armed manhood of France? There is no one in that land, from the Pyrenees to the Vosges, who would venture to make a forecast.

It is the desire of Englishmen of all parties to see France peaceful and prosperous, and governed by a stable Government deserving the respect of her citizens. On this side of the Channel there is nothing but goodwill towards the French Republic.

ART. IX.-Historical and Descriptive Catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery. Compiled by Sir GEORGE SCHARF; revised, &c., by LIONEL CUST, M.A. London: 1896.

IT T was stated, in a biography of Freeman's at the time of his death, that in spite of his interest in architecture he had only once in his life been dragged into a picture gallery by the exertions of his friend J. R. Green. It is, we take it, the misfortune of history that its writers have been too ready to rely upon purely literary evidence and to ignore the historical contributions of painting and the arts. The devotees of history might take a lesson from Dante and gain their information

'Non pur per lo sonar delle parole,

Ma per la vista che non meno agogna.'

At times a drawing may be the sole authority for a fact; the Irish Celtic chieftains of Elizabeth's time have been often incorrectly and picturesquely described. The authentic evidence for them is a drawing by Albert Dürer in the museum at Berlin. For those who see in history little but 'the biography of great men,' Carlyle declared with truth that a bodily likeness' was one of the most primary 'wants.' Painting also may throw a no less welcome light upon the character of an institution or of a people. The picture of Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Siena interprets the Ghibelline view of the Empire no less clearly than the De 'Monarchia ;' and the frescoes and paintings of Florence reveal to us a new and altogether different order of beings from the Florentines who are described in the writings of Macchiavelli and Guiciardini. Nevertheless, we once heard a brilliant scholar remark that he took no account of pictures, 'except, of course, of those few which had worked themselves into literature.'

The greater accessibility of the National Portrait Gallery may, perhaps, do something to more fully convince our historians of the need of illustrating our history by our art. The collection, founded in 1856, has at length concluded its period of forty years' wandering from Westminster to South Kensington, and thence to the distant wilderness of Bethnal Green. It will be of far more assistance in the more convenient position, which it owes to the munificence of Mr. Alexander, by the side of the National Gallery. The country is under very real obligations to Sir George Scharf, the late director of the Gallery, who had administered it

from the first. It is to his boundless devotion to his task and to the exhaustive knowledge of English portrait-painting which he enshrined in his note-books, that the collection owes its present excellence. It seems part of the irony of fate that he was deprived by ill health of the pleasure to which he had looked forward of rearranging the collection in its present home. We look forward to the successful developement of the Gallery under the efficient directorate of Mr. Cust. We do not think we are derogating from the due prerogatives of the Gallery in thinking of it mainly as a great deposit of historical material. To the portraitpainter no doubt it speaks a different language. There are fine paintings there, of course. But there is no superlative Holbein; to see his work at its best you must go to Windsor. It can hardly be said that Sir Joshua and Gainsborough are fairly represented; their finest work is either next door or scattered in private houses up and down England; and to see an adequate Vandyke you must, again, go to the National Gallery. In fact, Mr. Watts is the only painter who has contributed the worthiest representation of his skill in portrait-painting to the collection. It is not merely a gallery of fine portraits. It is primarily a collection of portraits of the men who in these last 300 years have deserved best of their country. On the whole the trustees have successfully followed the lines laid down by Lord Stanhope at the time of the foundation of the Gallery.

'There ought not,' he said, 'to be in this collection a single portrait as to which a man of good education passing round and seeing the name in the catalogue would be under the necessity of asking, "Who is he?" Such a question ought to be decisive against the admission of the portrait.'

Here was a high standard, which gives us, we own, an exalted and even formidable idea of what the trustees consider a good education. Still, if the legend at the bottom of the picture affords a welcome support to a hesitating memory, we almost always feel that the short biography justifies the admission. It is not, for instance, at the first glance apparent upon what ground Lady Ellenborough bases her right to appear among the too scanty collection of eminent women. But the experience of Ianthe' was surely varied and unique. Our doubts are satisfied as we learn that, after the death of Lord Ellenborough, she was successively married to a Bavarian nobleman, to a Greek general, and then to an Arab sheik. We could have certainly without much regret skied a divine or two above the dado. Of

Drake,

course also the collection is not yet complete. Frobisher, Sir Philip Sidney, Strafford, Gibbon, and Shelley are among the notable gaps which have not yet been filled up. Still, with some omissions and one or two superfluities, we have here a British Thousand,' who in their different ways have left their mark deepest upon the life of England. And what, we may ask, is the contribution which these 1,050 odd pictures, drawings, and statues makes to the history of our country?

In the first place, the Gallery brings back once more to our minds the slow uprising of British art in a way little calculated to flatter our national self-complacency. Horace Walpole used to find the evidence of the artistic backwardness of Elizabethan times in the extravagant ornament of Queen Elizabeth's portraits, with her hair loaded with crowns and powdered with diamonds, her vast ruff, her vaster fardingale and a bushel of pearls.' We may, perhaps, see in such ornament not merely the ostentation of vanity, but a naïve and unchecked delight in light and colour and gorgeous decoration, which augured not ill for art. But let any one look at the quaint portrait of Sir Henry Unton (d. 1596), with its odd procession of scenes passing through the background; the little pictures of his birth, marriage, his Oxford amusements, his travels to 'Venis,'' Paddua,' and across the Alps to the Low Countries; his funeral procession and his monument; and then, as evidence of the desperately late developement of English art, let him remember that Raphael had been dead for about eighty years before the picture was painted. Nor is it particularly flattering to our pride to remind ourselves that for the first 250 years of painting in England what painting was done was not executed by English hands. For two centuries and a half England found it easier to buy than to breed. Henry VIII. began by borrowing Holbein from Basle. From Spain Sir Antonio More, a native of Utrecht, was sent by Charles V. to paint Queen Mary and her Court. Zuccaro and Gheeraedts and Mierevelt, who painted the circle of Queen Elizabeth, came to us, the one from Italy and France, the second from Bruges, and the third from Delft. Charles I. invited Vandyke from Antwerp; Sir Peter Lely, the son of a man who had changed his name from Van der Vaas, was born at Soest, in Westphalia; and Sir Godfrey Kneller, court-painter to five kings of England, came to us from Lübeck. Dobson, who painted with Charles I. at Oxford, and Walker, Cromwell's portrait-painter,' are the only