The museums and galleries of the Louvre, now the most extensive and the .choicest collection of art works in the world, have acquired nearly all their greatness within our own tentury. The nucleus was made by the taste and liberality of Francis I., .who not only appreciated, but gathered the artists and art works of all countries around. lum. B. ut their works were mostly assembled at the palace of Fontainebleau. Colbert, in the reign of Louis XIV., made immense additions; all of which, remarks a writer of that time, were imprisoned by the royal 9'021 in the palaces of Versailles, but " ought to be ranged in beautiful order in the great halls of the Louvre, where they might be exposed to the admiration and joy of the French and the curiosity of strangers, and become a source of study and emulation to a French school of art." It bas taken two centuries to effect the accomplishment of that wise advice. Before the thne of Louis XVI. the galleries of the Louvre had become the principal musemn of valuables, both of mechanical and art works: and the seat of the royal academies of sciences, belles-lettres, architecture, paint ing, and sculpture. In 1775 it was proposed to gather all the masterpieces of art belonging to the kings in the long gallery, but it was at Versailles, instead, that they continued to accumulate. The republic of 1791 broke up this royal selfishness. The immense
art resources of France were brought out of the royal catacombs, collected, systematized, and exposed to public view in the great halls of the Louvre. It was during the fermen tation and the horrors of the great revolution of 1791 that the present national museum was ordained, and a commission appointed by the legislative assembly to collect all works of greatest value and beauty from the royal galleries and transport them to the Louvre, to form the museum of the republic. At a moment when France was almost crushed by a foreign coalition and in the heat of internal turbulence, Boland, then min ister of the interior (1792), was instructed to plan the organization of that vast museum. The museum Francais, afterward called musee central des arts, was opened in 1793. But it was a heterogeneous mass until many years after. In 1798 it was enriched by the pil lages of Napoleon I. in Italy. Since that time each new government of France has been ambitious to enlarge and perfect all departments of its museums. There never have existed museums comparable in extent or perfectness of arrangement to those of the Louvre at the present time.