'accidental;' but I long regretted that I had not been less
precipitate, though perhaps all was for the best--for the sufferer as
well as others. Mr Oxley had died some five weeks previously. This I
found from Renshawe's will, where it was recited as a reason that,
having no relative alive for whom he cared, his property was
bequeathed to Guy's Hospital, charged with L.100 a year to Ellen
Irwin, as long as she lived unmarried. The document was perfectly
coherent; and although written during the height of his monomania,
contained not a word respecting the identity of the youthful widow and
the Laura whose sad fate had first unsettled the testator's reason.

THE VINCEJO'S PRIZE.

[This somewhat curious incident in the under-current of
history, is given on the authority of Mr H. G. Austen, of
New Square, Lincoln's Inn, to whom the facts were
communicated by his father, Sir F. W. Austen, who commanded
one of the ships under the orders of Sir George Cockburn on
the occasion referred to in the narrative.]

It is well known that when the French republican armies were
overrunning the north of Italy, and commencing that wholesale system
of plunder which was afterwards carried out to such perfection by
Napoleon's marshals, the then reigning Duke of Florence offered the
magnificent collection of pictures which adorned the Pitti Palace, to
the English nation for the comparatively small sum of L.100,000--a sum
which, as the late George Robins might have said, with less than his
customary exaggeration, was 'hardly the price of the frames,
gentlemen.' Mr Pitt seems, unfortunately, to have been less sensible
of the value of the collection than scrupulous of asking parliament
for the money; and the opportunity was lost of redeeming the national
character, by such a set-off against the republican dispersion of the
noble collection of Charles I. This circumstance is well known; but it
will probably be new to most of our readers to learn, that many of the
best pictures which had thus failed to become British property 'by
purchase,' narrowly missed becoming such 'by conquest;' and that, in
fact, they were for some hours in British custody. Such, however, was
the fact, and the following narrative of the circumstance alluded to
may perhaps not be considered devoid of interest.

It was in the latter part of the year 1799, that a squadron of British
men-of-war was cruising in the Gulf of Genoa. It was