The Sun.
London, England, 1866-05-04 00:00:00

CORRESPONDENCE FROM PARIS.

(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.)
PARIS, Thursday Evening.
The French Government seems to be gradually
paving its way for some such manifestation of its
opinion in regard to Austria and Prussia as that to
which I have alluded. The following appreciation
of the position is worth literal translation :—" The
pacific phase into which the affairs of Germany
seemed to have entered does not appear to have
realised the hope to which it gave rise. While the
two Powers were coming to an agreement to revoke
the military preparations which were in progress a

fresh difficulty arose upon another point. The
Cabinet of Vienna, founding its motives upon the

movements of troops on the other side of the Po,
declared that while disarming in Bohemia it felt
itself forced to place its army upon a war footing in
Venetia, and to provide for the protection of its ter-
ritory on the Adriatic. Prussia, in reply to this
communication from Vienna, made it known to the
Government there that she could not change her
plans if Austria did not disarm in the south as well
as in the north. The understanding which ap-

peared to have been amicably established between
the two Courts, therefore, has not received further
development. The Cabinet of Vienna, nevertheless,
continues to disavow any idea of aggression, and
protests that it has no other object than to place it-
self in a position to resist any attack. The Italian
Government in arming also affirms that it only pro-

vides in the interest of defence for the necessities of
the situation created by Austria.
" The Cabinet of Berlin, in accepting the
proposal for disarmament, expressed the wish
that the same measure should be adopted by such
of the secondary States of Germany as had also made
preparations for war. It is stated that the Minister
of Prussia at Dresden had been charged to inform
the Court of Saxony that if her army were kept up
on the footing on which it had been placed the
Prussian Government could not refrain from taking
steps for her own security upon the frontier coin-

mon to both. It is difficult to draw conclusions
as to the views of the Germanic Diet. Attention
is directed to a despatch from Austria relative to
the Duchies, the original cause of the great dispute
between Austria and Prussia."

The views of the Siecle as to the coming war,
which it considers to be inevitable, are these :

" According to all probability, it will be in Saxony
that the armies of Austria and Prussia will strike
the first blow. Saxony extends between Prussia
and the north-west of Austria. Her whole limit
does not exceed forty leagues. The Elbe traverses
it from Bohemia, washes Dresden, the capital of
the little kingdom, and enters a few leagues further
into the Prussian provinces. The possession of
Dresden is for Prussia of important interest in a
strategical point of view. A glance at the map will
easily show this. Bohemia, when the Austrian
forces are concentrated, forms a vast natural in-
trenched camp, surrounded on all points by 'noun-

tains, constituting a perfect bastion which dominates
over all the surrounding countries. If the Aus-
trians, masters of all the passages which lead to
Saxony, should arrive at Dresden before the Prus-

siaus, their position would be eminently dangerous
for Prussia. Dresden, connected with Bohemia by
a railway, may be easily surrounded with field forti-
fications, which was done by Napoleon in 1813, and
serve as the basis of operations. From Dresden
to Berlin the distance by railway is only 160
kilometres, and on the whole way there is not
an important river, net a natural obstacle,
not a strong place capable of stopping
an enemy. (Perhaps it may not be unacceptable to
some of your readers if I again explain that a kilo-
metre is 1,000 metres, and that there are 1,609
metres in an English mile.) Berlin, therefore, after
a lost battle, would be at the mercy of the enemy.
"If, on the contrary, the Prussians should first be
able to occupy Dresden, their position would be
much less perilous. As they might manoeuvre at
will on both sides of the Elbe, it would be possible
for them to stop the Austrians at the outlets of the
mountains of Bohemia, and in any case they must
fight a battle in order to occupy Dresden before
thinking of marching upon Berlin. Dresden, there-
fore, seems to be the point upon which the first
efforts of the belligerents will be directed. The
Prussian frontier is only 32 kilometres from Dres-
den, whilst the Austrian frontier is at a distance of
64. Saxony, it is known, is the ally of Austria, but
the Saxon forces do not exceed 25,000 men of all
arms, and they are consequently unable to resist a
Prussian army concentrated upon the frontier, and
within a single march of Dresden. We may there-
fore expect to see the signal of hostilities given by
the entrance into the capital of Saxony of one of the
two armies. As the importance of this point
is ;vital for Prussia, it is very probable
that she will take the initiative. The Saxon forces
would then no doubt retreat upon the fortress of
Konigstein, situated at the issue of the gorges of
Pirna, by which the Elbe, making for itself a pas-
sage across the chain of the Erzgeberge, enters the
plains of Saxony. It is at the foot of this fortress
that the railway passes which leads to Prague, the

capital yif Bohemia, and from thence to Vienna.
The forces of Saxony would there be in a good
position, and might assist the Austrian army."
The Sieca proceeds to express a favourable opinion
of the grand army of Italy, and gives its reason for
imagining that it would surprise the world by its
prowess against Austria. Italy, besides, has a great
advantage over Austria. Her magnificent squadron
will command the Adriatic, and a larkling of troops
either in Venetia, or at Trieste, would make an
enormous diversion, and even change the theatre of
war. With the Italians on the Izonzo, and Gari-
baldi in the mountains of the Tyrol, the places of
the Quadrilateral being cut off from all communi-
cation with Austria, would singularly lose their
importance.
In reference to the above allusion to Garibaldi, I
may state that the General has declared his inten-
tion to take the field again should Austria resort
to hostilities.
It results from the inquiries of an eminent engi-
neer, sent to make investigations into the subject,
that the tunnel through Mount Cenis cannot be
completed for five years. When this tunnel through
the Alps shall have been made, the journey from
Paris to Turin will be effected in 22 hours. More
than nine years have already passed since the
tunnel was commenced. The beginning of this
great work was formally inaugurated on the 31st
of August, 1857, by the King of Sardinia and
Prince Napoleon. The idea of this tunnel, it is
said, was conceived by a peasant residing near the
mountain named Mcidail, and when the engineers
first examined into the plans they thought the
tunnel could not be completed in less than 36 years.
About seven kilometres have, however, been
finished in less than teu years, and at the present
rate of about a kilometre per annum, it is confi-
dently believed that this gigantic and important
plrla.ge
wthiireoltaigthhe tthuhe -12‘.elpishhindaey be terminated
viaille

made, George Canning, albeit a politician of a
serious mocd, said that the Londoners about
Wapping considered it to be a great bore, but what
will the natives of the Alps think of such an un-
derhand proceeding as a tunnel across Mount
Cenis ?

THE ROYAL ACADEMY.

(Private View—This Day.)

According to annual custom we have this after-
noon had the gratification of attending the Private
View of the Royal Academy Exhibition for the
current season. It is a Private View which, as the
town very well knows, is yearly thrown open
on the first Friday in May—we were going
to say to a select few, but, remembering the
fashionable crush through which we have until a
few minutes since been with no little adroitness
threading our way industriously for several hours
consecutively, we will say by preference—to
a select multitude ! To this select multitude—

(including within it, besides the usual sprinkling of
art-critics, all the notabilities in the metropolis at so
early a date in the season)—the noble suite of apart-
ments still allotted to the Royal Academy in the
eastern half of the National Gallery, are flung open,
as we have said, on the morning of the very
first Friday (whatever the date may happen to
be) following immediately after May-day ! The
evening of the next day (the Saturday) being,
according to the same annual custom, set apart for
that most charming banquet of the year—the Royal
Academy Dinner ! So that on the Monday after-
wards the public may be admitted without the risk
of any subsequent interruption whatever to the free
enjoyment of what there may chance to be of excel-
lence in the wide range of the Academy Exhibition.
The present, it may here perhaps be worth re-
minding our readers, is the Ninety-Eighth of these
annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy since the
date of its original foundation. It may also at this
moment be not uninteresting to recall to public re-
collection the fact that during the lapse of these
ninety-eight years, constituting the lifetime as yet
of this great National Institution of the Fine Arts,
there have been installed at the head of it the fol-
lowing—

PRESIDENTS OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
Sir Joshua Reynolds 1768-1791.
Benjamin West 1792-1820.
Sir Thomas Lawrence
Sir Martin Shee
Sir Charles Eastlake
Sir Francis Grant

Whether the Academy will contrive to " hold its
own" for another season's exhibition at the National
Gallery remains to be seen•—the possibility, we
won't go so far as to say the probability, being that
before the advent of the Season of 1867, the habitat
of the R.A.'s and A.R.A.'s will be situated, not as at
present to the north of Trafalgar Square, but thence-
forth and en permanence upon a site of their own to the
north of Piccadilly. However this may be—there,
in one moiety of the National Gallery, midway
between the Strand and Pall-Mall, the Royal
Academicians and Associates contrive still to hold
possession of the walls of the apartments they and
their predecessors have so frequently adorned be-
fore now with the products of their artistic genius
and industry. The Exhibition for this present year
of grace 1866 includes within it works of art
numbering up altogether the magnificent aggregate
of one thousand and fifty-three ! But then, included
in that aggregate are productions not only of the
sculptors' chisel and mallet, not only of the paint-
ers' brush and mahl-stick, but of graver and etching
needle, of camel hair and crayon ! The five principal
apartments, however, it should be here added, dis-
play upon their walls pictures to the number in all
of just 800—counting among these eight hundred
pictures, of course, not merely such as are more
happily awarded places of honour upon the line, but
such others as, far less fortunately for their pro-
ducers, either sink towards the floor, or soar towards
the ceiling. Upon the title-page of the current
catalogue there is imprinted this suggestive and
elevating motto, selected from the late Sir Charles
Eastlake's Contributions to the Literature of the Fine
Arts :

" Beauty, in all its highest forms, is calculated to im-
press on human beings the belief in a perfection greater

Lan this world contain%."

Foremost among the more noticeable circum-
stances gladdening the attention of all those who
may seek admittance this year to the examination
of the Royal Academy Exhibition, is the thrice-
welcome fact that one of the greatest painters of the
age, one of the most illustrious of the Royal Aca-
demicians now living, again takes his place among
the chief Exhibitors—Daniel Maclise 1 Sir Daniel
Maclise, as he might very readily have been by this
time had he wished it—" Sir Daniel Maclise, Presi-
dent of the Royal Academy," and not (as he still
continues to be) simply one of the Forty Royal
Academicians.

Mr. Maclise—who has been occupied exclusively
of late years in the adornment of the National Palace
of the Legislature down at Westminster with his
two gigantic water-glass pictures—the one of
them " The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher
at Waterloo," the other " The Death of Nelson at
Trafalgar"—is, at any rate, represented this sea-
son very nobly and attractively by (No. 47), the
finished sketch (entitled, " Here Nelson fell")
from which the second of those two grand histo-
rical paintings of his was produced. Although thus
simply mentioned by us as a sketch, the picture now
hanging on the walls of the Academy is one of
sufficiently large dimensions to afford something lise
an adequate idea of the extraordinary merits of
the masterpiece of which it was in a manner the
precursor ! The design is intended, as we learn
with no little satisfaction, to be engraved and pub-
lished by the Art Union of London.
Mr. Leighton occupies a still larger space by right
of the most remarkable among his contributions
(No. 292), an oblong canvass of fourteen feet
by four, representing a procession of the maidens
of Syracuse, on their way to offer a bridal
sacrifice of wild beasts at the Temple of
Diana. Under the light of an autumnal
morning the virginal troop is revealed wending
its way--leading onwards, as intended sacrifices,
the limber forms of leonine whelps and young-
ling leopards, hung about with garlands and

festoons of roseate coronals and evergreens !
Visible here and there among the foliage of ilex
and cedar, and fruit-laden orange-shrubs, the blue
gleam of the eternal sea and of the eternal sky con-
stituting the " background !" Another, but lesser
production, from the hand of the same artist (N 0.4),
reveals to us the charming forms and features of a
happy couple seated musingly cheek to cheek, and
entitled by the artist briefly, but significantly, the
" Painter's Honeymoon." Yet another picture close
by (No. 7), from the same hand, is simply the por-
traiture of a lady, but of a lady whose countenance
is worthy of being so pourtrayed.
Disappointingly conspicuous among the absentees
areboth of the two great leaders of the modern school
of the Pre-Raphaelites, that is, of course, of the Pre-
Raphaelite School redivivus—Mr. Holman Hunt
and Mr. John Millais. The latter, we suspect,
has been frittering away his varied and radiant
powers rather too prodigally upon the illustration
—but very rarely indeed with anything like success
—of current light literature : of such ephemeral
stories of everyday life, let us say, as those prattled
off so volubly by such slippered tale-tellers as Mr.
Anthony Trollope.
Mr. Stanfield, however--untiring veteran as he is

—sustains his high reputation befittingly, with two
noble seapieces—(No. 58) a wreck hard by " Tin-
tagel Castle, on the coast of Cornwall," and (No.
78) a view of " The Pic du Midi d'Ossau," in the
Pyrenees.

Mr. Hook, another of the sea-painters we should in
truth be very loth indeed to miss from the walls of
the Academy, refreshes our eyes again with as
many as four of his ever-welcome expositions of
brine and foam, of
sky and water—sky exquisitely
blue, water deliciously green—dripping sand and
dripping shingle, salt sea-weed, and salter fisher-
folk ! Foremost among these in position, if not in
merit, is (No. 99), "Landing Salmon"—next (No.
. ._.

148) a group of btixom, chattering " Washerwomen"
hard at work upon the coast of Brittany. Besides these
there is (No. 239)) a fizhhagboat plat putting off from

shore, and rather irrelevantly entitled, " Give us
this day our daily bread." And lastly, completing
the list of five (No. 268), " Baiting for Haddocks."
Mr. Ansdell also contributes four paintings, though
these four, as his very name will denote, are of
a widely contrasting character—all four of them,
these Ansdells of 'sixty-six, being delineations of
Spanish life and Spanish scenery.
Mr. Phillip puts in at least one notable appear-
ance with (No. 132) " A Chat round the Brasero"
—the other two pictures from the same master hand
(No. 93, and No. 533) being simply portraits, but
portraits, it should be added, wonderfully life-like—
all but living and breathing.
Mr. Goodall commands attention at the very first
glance, if only by reason of the startling dimen-
sions and impressive character of his great scriptural
painting of " Ishmael and Hagar" in the wilder-
ness. The appalling horrors of the desert he
has wonderfully contrived to express in the very
clenching of the maternal right hand, in the sup-
pressed agony of abstraction gleaming out of the
maternal eyes—more forcibly even than in such
ghastlier accessories to the picture as the foul-beaked
carrion-loving bird of prey, perched gloatingly upon
the remains of the camel—remains withered away
to the ghastly appearance of a skeleton.
Mr. Faed, though he contributes no more than
two pictures to the exhibition, and even one of
those of no very ambitious kind and of no consi-
derable size, will, nevertheless, from the manner in
which the homely theme he has selected for his
chief work this year, has been treated by him, be
recognised in (No. 235) as in great force—namely
in a simple genre picture entitled " Pot Luck,"
portraying a couple of little peasant lassies feeding
poultry 1 His other picture (No. 11) " Ere Care
begins"—small though it is—is worthy of special
examination as the artist's Diploma work on his
election as an Academician.

Mr. Marks more than justifies his claim to be
elevated to the rank of an Associate—he sus-
tains to the full his high and still rising repu-
tation both as a painter and as a humorist
by (No. 393) "My Lady's Page in Disgrace."
Another comical picture by the same droll of the
pencil is (No. 565) briefly but sufficiently entitled

" The Notary."
;Again this year we are right glad to meet once
more Mr. Burgess, who broke ground with such
brilliant success last season with his animated pic-
ture of the spectators at a Bull-fight, entitled (it
will surely be remembered upon the instant by all
who saw it) " Bravo, Toror This year, the young
artist's single contribution to the gallery—(for,
again, he contents himself with no more than one,
but one worthy of the place of honour it secures to
itself upon the line)—is a companion-picture to the
last, the one just mentioned—yet still for all that full
of rare excellence in the animated and• exquisitely
humorous expression of the countenances pourtrayel.
This painting may be found in the West Room (No.
350), and is descriptively entitled in the Academy's
Catalogue, " Selling Fans at a Spanish Fair."
And, in very truth, a riant delightful picture it is
—worthy of an artist who could seize public
attention at his first advent by surprising those who
had never heard of his name before with such a
maiden-work as Bravo Toro ! The Fan Sellers (and
Buyers) it should be added, are almost equal in
vitality and vivacity to the variously-excited group
of the frequenters of the Spanish Amphitheatre.

BANK OF FRANCE.

• - s -

The following is the return of the Bank of France
for the week ending to-day, together with the cor-
responding figures of the previous account :