Some conception of the amount of sculpture at Constantinople may be formed from the fact that when Justinian rebuilt the church of St. Sophia he found in its area alone no less than five hundred and seven statues, of which eighty were portraits of Christian kings, and the rest antique. The greater part, indeed, were of pure Greek origin, and over seventy were of Hellenic gods and goddesses. These were all distributed in various quarters of the city. Eusebius, in his Life of Constantine, says that the Eastern capital was everywhere filled with elegant bronzes which had once been scattered throughout the provinces of the empire. Later emperors continued feebly to protect these, and to employ them in adorning new structures which they erected; but the creative power and impulse were alike dead, and the discriminating faculty was no longer able to distinguish between masterly excellence and the veriest of rubbish.

After the fall of Rome the taste for the beautiful constantly sank lower and lower in the West, until marble statues were not considered worth the stealing. With figures of silver, gold, and bronze the case was different, though even these were valued chiefly for the old metal contained in them. With art as art the medieval world had little to do. Europe had been overrun by the barbarian nations, and society everywhere was in a state of restless ferment. Life was a serious business, and the problems which it presented for solution left no time to be bestowed upon the elegant trivialities of Greek painters and sculptors. Still, such works as had survived the calamities of war and the iconoclasm of over-zealous Christians apparently remained undisturbed for the greater portion of the Middle Ages, mankind no longer concerning itself with them either one way or another. If they stood, they stood; if they tottered from their bases through decay, or were over

thrown by accident or malice, they were allowed to lie where they fell, till covered up by the drifting sand which no one cared to sweep from above them. Indeed, so little were they prized that they were often broken to pieces to serve the purposes of ordinary stone or to be burned into lime, though it was only in the centuries immediately preceding the modern period that anything like wholesale destruction was begun.

Of more recent plunderings there is little to be said. The reader will remember the rapacity of Bonaparte in the campaign of 1796, when he extorted from the helpless Pius VI. a hundred of the choicest paintings and statues in Italy; and again in the following year, when the Vatican and other celebrated galleries were mercilessly robbed to supply the needs of the Musée Napoléon. Among the treasures thus carried off were the bronze horses of St. Mark's, which adorned the triumphal arch of the Place du Carrousel until returned to the Venetians by the Emperor Francis in 1815. From the illfated Parthenon, in addition to the Elgin Marbles now in London, numerous fragments have been conveyed to Paris, Vienna, Baden, Copenhagen, and other places, where they may still be found.

To discuss the various removals of sculpture in modern times would take us beyond the limits of the present article, involving, as it would, an account of the discovery of the principal works, the founding of the great European museums, and the variations of ownership dependent on gift, purchase, or inheritance. So extensive have these changes been that it is often impossible to locate with certainty statues described by Winckelmann, Visconti, Clarac, and other writers of a generation or two ago. The antiquities of the Giustiniani Palace have in part been left undisturbed, in part have been taken to the Vatican, in part have become the property of Prince Torlonia. Of those formerly in the Far

nese Palace, some are now in the museum of Naples, others in England. The possessions of the Villa Campana have been transferred to St. Petersburg and Paris, those of the Villa Negroni to Paris and England. Of the two hundred and ninety-four statues of the Villa Albani, which were seized and sent to France by Napoleon, all except a relief of Antinous. were sold there by Cardinal Albani, on their restoration in 1815, to avoid the enormous expense of carrying them back to Italy. In the future, as in the past,

similar vicissitudes will of course occur, as family lines become extinct, or the loss of wealth compels the sale of private collections, to retrieve the shattered fortunes of their owners. Only when all the products of the ancient chisel have been gathered into national galleries, like the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Glyptothek of Munich, can they expect to find a permanent and settled abode. For the benefit of all students and lovers of art, let us hope that this may be at no distant day.

William Shields Liscomb.

WITH feelings anything but jubilant we received our first impressions of the intérieur in which we had engaged to pass several months. And yet the privilege of entering thus a French household was one not to be found every day; was one that we had searched for, plotted and manœuvred for, ever since we had been in provincial France, and one which we had finally obtained only by means of the quiet treachery of one member of the family to the rigid principle of exclusion and seclusion which governed the rest.

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That we had no choice in familles bourgeoises goes without saying. It was Hobson's choice, and one which we ought to be thankful for. So we were, later, when we found our French speech becoming glib, and our manners bending from their Anglo-Saxon stiffness into something of the suppleness and suavity of those around us; but that time of thankfulness seemed somewhat remote as we received our first impressions.

The seaport town was centuries old and marvelously quaint. Its appearance from the sea was a cluster of colorful walls steeped in antiquity, high-roofed,

and covered with gray moss and straggling ivy. Gothic spires rose above the roofs, time-worn and gray; picturesque ruins, with voluminously draped Virgins flaunting gaudy raiment from gabled and cusped niches, gathered close upon the quays. The abrupt côte, rising like a background of solid emerald behind the town, was crowned with even greater antiquity, and from its summit grim, fortress-like Norman walls looked down upon the Gothic airiness below as a septuagenarian might gaze upon the youthful frivolity of half a century.

Through the dusky streets fishers' wives, in gay kerchiefs, profuse petticoats, and clanking sabots, cried their glistening merchandise. Norman peasant women, in tall snowy caps and russethued garments, drove in from outlying farms donkey carts laden with brilliant fruit and vegetables. Foreign-looking sailors and native fishermen, almost as bronzed and as jeweled as the sailors, loitered and basked in the sunshine. Even the bourgeois element (there is no aristocracy in that sleepy, provincial town), with its dress of yesterday and its dull, listless air, seemed entirely of another race and world from the gay and

bustling Parisians upon whom we had founded our knowledge of French life and character.

As we turned away from all this picturesqueness, it was with something of a shock that we faced the intérieur that was to be our temporary home. There was nothing picturesque about it; for what in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth can be less picturesque than provincial bourgeoisism? Peasant homes are picturesque, although comfortless, and a beauty-loving temperament can find some compensation for chill and gloom, dampness and disorder, in quaint irregularity of forms, the half mystery of unwindowed and noontide twilight, the antiquity of household gods handed down from one generation to another with religious care. Provincial bourgeoisism, dressed by cheap tailors and dressmakers, its intérieurs furnished from vulgar modern shops, what can be more bourgeois? Not even the cabbage roses and sad haircloth of American rural" best rooms are less beautiful than the waxed or painted floors with showy, rectangular tapis in their centre, the stiff and ghostly chairs and tables from the first empire, the wax fruit, paper roses, atrocious pictures, china vases, superabundant gilt clocks, and mantel statuettes in painted faience of French provincial middle life.

Our household was more interesting than many, for the reason that it represented an unusual blending of social distinctions, a coming together of two different strains, and a consequent uneasy position between the upper strata of the unconventional basse classe and the lower of the respectable and priggish bourgeoisie. One grandfather had lived in a château (his own by purchase, not by heritage), as we were soon told. The other had commanded a fishing-boat, as we more tardily learned from the indiscreet revelations of the garret. The châtelain's daughter invested her reduced

fortune in a trimming-shop, and the fisherman's son put his into an education. By the marriage of the fisherman's socially promoted son and the châtelain's socially descended daughter the trimming-shop was turned into a cheap boarding-school, patronized mostly by fishermen's sons, peasants' sons, and the sons of town butchers and shoemakers. The fisherman's son and the châtelain's daughter had long ago accomplished their warfare with life, with poverty, with baffled ambitions, and, if truth must be told, with each other, and for years had slept in one grave in the parish cemetery. The boarding- school had been turned into money, and upon that feeble sum, supplemented by the trifling wage enjoyed by one of the sons as a government employé, lived the celibate family whose intérieur received us.

There were four in the family, one brother and three sisters: all between thirty and forty years of age; all with nerves and red hair; all unselfishly devoted to each other, making, three of them at least, every sacrifice one for another; but all manifesting this unusual affection by what seemed to our calmer though perhaps not better tempers the fiercest and most persistent quarreling possible to human nature. Often and often, as we have sat at meat with them, has some trifling discussion arisen, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand in its first threatening, but swelling almost instantly to such a tempest of tempers and tornado of words that first one has flown away from the table in a rage, then another, another, and another, till, in the lull which followed the banging of doors and the shouting of recriminations through keyholes, we two Americans have sat smiling alone, sole possessors of the table. Ten, perhaps five, minutes later the flushed and disheveled belligerents would return one by one to their places, and the repast would finish amid a most beatific atmosphere of family affection. It was a usual occurrence,

on my return from an absence of a few days, to find the key of my room missing. Inquiry would invariably reveal the fact that during a volcanic eruption one of the sisters had flown to my room and locked herself in from the others. As soon as the elemental chaos had subsided, and the locked-in sister had emerged from her retreat, one of the others would possess herself of my key and hide it, that she might another time have easier access to her sister's ear, and not be again forced to scream sisterly vituperations through a keyhole. That keys were scarce in our house is easy to believe!

Once we sat in the little salon quietly entertaining a friend. Suddenly we heard the family vials uncorked in an adjacent room, and the family wrath hiss and fume after the customary fashion. Suddenly the salon door was violently thrown open, and a distracted figure rushed through the room and out at another door. This was Mademoiselle Marie, from whom Mademoiselle Juliette had taken refuge in a locked room, and upon whom Marie stole a march by descending upon her unprotected rear through the unguarded salon door.

One only of such quarrels as these would, I am convinced, leave gall enough in our less effusive and more vindictive natures to spoil the beauty of affection forever. But with our deep resentment for insulting words, we know better than to use them; with a capacity for undying anger in ourselves, we refrain from arousing it in others; and realizing that dissension is a most serious thing, we avoid it with the awe and trembling we yield to all tragic powers. Did we consider all this as but the temporary atmospheric disturbance - electrical and painful while it lasts, but swiftly passing that our French friends do, doubtless our lives would witness the same interminable succession of scorching typhoons and balmy calms, which would hardly be an advantage over the more

serene even if duller monotony of our days, I believe. The dry, feverish skins and drawn faces of the sisters, each prematurely aged, showed the physical effects of this uncomfortable vivacity of temper and utter want of self-control which are such marked characteristics, not only of our particular family, but of the whole French race. The French are a demonstrative people, whose life is largely emotional, and who regard moral discipline and self-control chiefly as an English folly. French children rarely learn the moral weight and significance of self-control, and when it is taught at all it is merely as a matter of social convenience and convention, one of exterior politeness and not of spiritual culture and harmony. Conscience is not developed among them, conscience is not a personal possession in the Roman Catholic Church, and to be agreeable is greater in France than to be good. Thus the French are fussily polite away from their intérieurs, while in them they live in an incessant restlessness of emotions, good and bad. Emotional expansiveness and freedom are sometimes good to see, but the self-restraint of our more conscientiously introspective northern temperament is safer and surer to live and die with. There may be fewer kisses and cooler embraces with us, but likewise fewer stinging words and breezy recriminations.

Our first impression (and our last) of the house we were to enter was of a blank and staring white modern wall, entirely devoid of architectural decoration, standing by itself in an uninteresting street, one of the new streets upon which the inhabitants prided themselves as proof that their town was not falling into decay. There was not one inch of garden space about it, and the narrow front door opened directly from the street into a long, dark entry, from which ascended long, dark stairs. A grocer's shop and an étude d'huissier occupied the ground floor, while the real

dwelling began only at the top of the staircase. Such, as is well known, is the habit of France, and the most elegant of town and city appartements are often over shops and offices. French appartements usually extend over but one floor, and a flight of stairs within an appartement is almost unknown. I remember how astonished we were, after years of Continental life, at the extreme neighborly familiarity which seemed to exist in London houses.

“Why, maman," said Charlie, “they are all over each other's appartements, exactly as if chez eux! One sees the same faces at the windows, upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady's chamber!" It was only with an effort that maman herself remembered that English families, like American, usually live not upon one floor, but all over the house.

Our house, however, was owned by its occupants, and entirely occupied by them. It was large, light, and airy, with wide French windows, light-papered walls, and earthen-tiled floors. It was somewhat raggedly furnished, that is, ragged in effect, not in fact; for unmendedness was an abomination in the eyes of the thrifty sisters. Everything was whole, but most things were threadbare. There were a few heirlooms, such as carved bedsteads, handsome plate, and massive bureaux. The salon curtains were châtelaine grandmamma's cashmere shawls; the table cover was a patchwork of several generations of silk and velvet gowns; the bit of square tapis was cheap and worn; there was no sofa; the chairs were rickety, modern, and mean. The bed-rooms were cheerful and the beds luxurious, but the toilet conveniences were scarcely less primitive than those of a prairie farm-house, and the carpets patched and darned. The small dining-room, except for a magnificent buffet, was of Spartan simplicity, as was the boudoir, where the sewing-machine stood.

There were twelve dozen dozens of

sheets in the overflowing presses, and as many pillow-cases. Of tablecloths and towels there seemed to be no end, and I could hardly find a place to hang up a garment because of the insolent ubiquity of packed piles of napkins. This wealth of napery had not been a parti pris, but was the accumulation of various heritages. One grand-uncle, dying at ninety-two, had left seven hundred sheets to be divided among his heirs! In our family was a special shelf set aside for linen "in use," and when a guest came who passed perhaps two nights, perhaps only one, in a year in our house, the bed linen which he had used during the last visit, ticketed with his name and the date of that event, was brought down from its shelf in the garret! Napery in bourgeois families is a property, like houses and land. Its owner never expects to wear his stock out, but to reckon it always a part of his wealth and important assets of his estate at death.

The old fashioned, coarse, and clumsy under-linen of the sisters was in scarcely less profusion. Some of it had descended from the châtelaine grandmother, some was woven by the piscatorial ancestress. This stock was held in common, as was every other right and possession of the establishment. Only the solitary brother has a right to say ma chemise;" those garments in feminine form being not individual possessions, but common property, always spoken of as nuns in convents refer to theirs, not as "ma chemise," but "une de nos chemises."

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