Their work is always done in a hurry; they knock off a copy in a week, and when it is sold, they begin another.
If some one, more ambitious than his fellows, undertakes an original work, whose opinion can he obtain as to its merits or demerits?
The men of the reigning class know nothing about it, and the princes very little.

The owner of the finest gallery in Rome said last year, in the salon of an Ambassador, "I admire nothing but what you French call _chic_" Prince Piombino gave the painter Gagliardi an order to paint him a ceiling, and proposed to pay him by the day.

The Government has plenty to attend to without encouraging the arts: the four little newspapers which circulate at remote periods amuse themselves by puffing their particular friends in the silliest manner.
The foreigners who come and go are often men of taste, but they do not make a public.

In Paris, Munich, Duesseldorf, and London, the public has an individuality; it is a man of a thousand heads.

When it has marked a rising artist, it notes his progress, encourages him, blames him, urges him on, checks him.