workmen to visit the Exposition and to write
reports on what they saw. The men were
accredited to M. Haussoullier, who had been
appointed by the commissioners to the charge
of the British workman's hall in the
Exhibition building; and M. Fouche, an artisan
member of the Conseil des Prud'hommes,
attended them as guide and interpreter. The
Society of Arts have published their reports in
one thick volume; and a most interesting volume
it is; showing what impression French, life,
French manners, and French industries made
on the unadulterated British intellect, and how
far the insular workman considered himself
inferior or superior to his continental rival.

The reports are also interesting as a study of
character in their various treatment of the
subject in hand. Some are pictorial, taking in the
outside aspect of things, and detailing personal
doings and adventures; others are technical,
dealing only with the method of the special
manufacture; some are critical; others are
statistical; some show that the authors thought
more of themselves and how they were doing
their work, rather than of the work itself, and
others show exactly the reverse. Some, again,
are enthusiastic about everything. The charm
and spell of novelty was on their writers. The
pretty, odd, theatrical life of Paris when seen
for the first time, the white caps of the women,
the blue blouses of the working men, the clear
air and absence of "blacks," the pleasantly
showy cafes in place of onr hideously brilliant
gin-shops, the outward gaiety and good temper
and courteous little forms of politeness, the
individual freedom mixed with that peculiar public
discipline which at first sight seems the very
ideal of good government— all was as delightful
to certain of the more genial sort as it was
to us when we first went over; and it takes
us back to the freshness of our own early
pleasure in French life to read the boyish
delight of some among them. But all were not
equally charmed. Some disliked the Sunday
gaiety; others disliked so much gaiety generally,
and thought the men frivolous and childish who
could find amusement in puerile pleasures;
others, again, contrasted the orderliness and
innocence of the French fêtes with the
brutal sottishness of London junketings, and
gave the palm to the Gaul. All liked the Conseil
des Prud'hommes; all liked the liberal opening
of the museums, &c., to the working classes,
and the care taken of the workman's education;
some liked the mode of life, the brightness
and movement of the Boulevards, and the family
gatherings in the open air; others thought
there was no family life in the nation— taking
home, to mean the four walls which enclose
one's pots and pans. " From what I saw of
the French nation," says one, with a grave
oddness of phrase very expressive, " I consider
that their mode of life is peculiarly foreign to
the English mind. They appear remarkably
fond of imbibing their favourite wines while
exposing themselves to the public gaze." All
liked the clean and tidy look of the working
women, and compared it with the dragging
trains and second-hand finery of their own wives
and daughters. The short dress carried it
invariably over the limp long petticoat; and the
white cap carried it over the dirty, battered, and
tawdry bonnet. All the men were pleasantly
impressed by the self-respect, the order, the
equality, of the workshops; to find the men and
foremen alike in the blouse, with no difference
of costume to mark the minute differences in
grade to which we attach so much importance,
but all content to appear of the " wages class."

The most enthusiastic admirer of French
ways and modes is the writer who leads off the
rest— Mr. Hooper, a cabinet-maker— and his
paper is certainly the most graphic and
pictorial. It is a charming sketch, and would do
honour to a practised hand; yet Mr. Hooper
says of himself that this was the first fortnight's
holiday he had ever had, and that he " had
known little else than toil from his boyhood,
working at a bench not less than ten hours
per day in a dismal, dirty, unhealthy workshop":
— not exactly the kind of life for
acquiring a good method either of observation
or narration. But if his paper stand out as
the most observant and pictorial, there are
others which are as thoughtful, and of even
a more refined tone of criticism. "The art
of wood- carving," says Mr. Baker, "may
be said to begin at the rudest notching and
terminate in the noblest thoughts, expressed in
the most beautiful forms." Mr. Wilson, a
cutler, quotes Chaucer and Rabelais, and
knows all about the famous Damascus blades;
throughout, one is struck by the comparatively
extensive reading and the justness of observation,
of men toiling painfully at their life's
labour for daily wages.

As a cabinet-maker stands at the head of the
list, we will take cabinet-making first. All the
workers in this trade who have written on what
they saw, agree in two statements; first, that the
French wood-carvings are infinitely superior to
our own; second, that their rough or carcass
work is just as inferior. " I saw carvings that
seemed to me to be impossible to have been
done with tools, but must have grown into
shape and form, they were so delicate and
chaste," says Mr. Hooper. 5ut he adds soon
after that, the carcass work is not so well done
as ours; that our dovetailing and drawer work
is neater; that they have more jointing than
we have, as the stuff they use in carcass work
is very narrow and hard, whereas we use wide,
soft pine. A second witness, or rather two in
one, Messrs. Hughes and Prior, are even more
explicit as to the demerits of the rough work.
They say that carpentry is gradually falling into
disuse in Paris, in consequence of the substitution
of iron for wood, and that such specimens
of work by French joiners as they saw were
mostly of a very rude kind. Their partitions
were made of rough and crooked scantling,
which any English surveyor would have
condemned; their joists were placed at irregular
intervals, and as if laid at random by labourers,