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point of view. ' L'ltalie d'Hier,' by the brothers De 

 Goncourt, written in the winter of 1855-56, is entirely 

 devoid of what we should call ' the feeling for Italy.' To 

 read this description of Italy is very like taking up a book 

 illustrating the contents of the first Exhibition of 1851, 

 when all sense of the beautiful seemed absolutely lost. 

 Georges Sand, in her youthful bitterness, exclaimed in 

 the 'Thirties that Italy was 'Peintures aux plafonds, 

 ordure sous les pieds ' ; but that criticism is again of a 

 totally different kind. Edmond de Goncourt looks at a 

 picture and says : ' La Vierge chez ce peintre, c'est la 

 "Vierge du Vinci, mais avec une expression courtisanesque.' 

 The drawings by one of the brothers in this book are rather 

 clever, and in describing a ball at the Pitti in the Grand 

 Duke's time he gives an absurd caricature of our English 

 Minister of the day, Lord Normanby, which no one who 

 remembers him can read now without a smile. The book 

 is well worth looking at as typical of French criticism 

 of that day, and anybody who cares to enjoy a strong 

 literary contrast has only to take up afterwards Paul 

 Bourget's ' Sensations d'ltalie ' (published in 1891, and 

 dedicated to Eobert Lord Lytton by his affectionate friend 

 and admirer) and his most daintily illustrated little gem 

 called ' Un Saint,' published! n 1894. Here the forty years 

 have indeed altered sentiment, feeling, aspiration, and de- 

 scription. Both are French ; I prefer the Bourget. 



The famous 'Voyage en Italic' by H. Taine (1866) 

 is literature of a much more serious kind. It is descrip- 

 tive rather than critical in the modern sense, and the 

 chapter ' La Peinture Florentine ' should be read by, 

 anyone seriously interested in the Florence galleries. It 

 contains an enlightened sentence on the famous Venus de' 

 Medici, forcing one to remember what so many forget- 

 that the arms were a restoration by Bernini, and are very 

 likely the cause of much that fails to please in this statue. 



