tasies, fall into the general rule; and the lady
artists, Diana Chisi, Angelica Kaufmann, and Anna Maria Schurman, may
be cited as equally exhibiting the same simplicity. There are some,
indeed, in whom this affectation of simplicity goes almost to the
length of rudeness. A charming cabinet picture, in the possession of
the writer of these pages, by the celebrated Philip Wouvermans, well
known for the familiar 'gray horse' which characterises all his
pictures, is scratched with a P. W. which would disgrace the lowest
form in a charity school. And, with every allowance for haste and
indifference, it is impossible not to suspect something like
affectation in the rude and sprawling signatures which we sometimes
find, not only in ancient, but even in comparatively modern artists.

It would carry us far beyond our allotted limits to pursue further the
examination of individual monograms. But there are some in the class
of symbolical monograms, already referred to, which we must notice
more in detail. Most of the monograms of this class, like that of
Correggio, given above, involve a pun, sometimes, indeed, not a very
recondite one. Thus the French artist, Jacob _Stella_, who died in
1647, invariably signs his pictures with _a star_--a device which the
modern artist, Frederic _Morgenstern_, has applied to himself,
representing his own name by the letter M, prefixed to the same
symbol.

In the same way, an ancient artist, Lauber (leaf-gatherer), adopted a
leaf (in German, _Laub_), as his symbol. Haus Weiner, in allusion to
the genial beverage from which his name is derived, marked his works
with the sign of a bunch of grapes. David Vinkenbooms (Anglice,
tree-finch), a Dutch painter of the sixteenth century, took a 'finch
perched upon a branch of a tree' as his pictorial emblem. Birnbaum
(pear-tree) employed a similar emblem; while the monogram of Bernard
Graat, a Dutch painter, who lived in the end of the seventeenth
century, though utterly without significance to an English eye, would
at once suggest the name of the painter to his own countrymen: Graat,
in Dutch, signifying the spine of a fish, represented in this curious
monogram.

The history of another emblem is perhaps still more remarkable. By a
singular and perhaps humorously intended coincidence, three German
painters, George Hufnagel, Sebastian Scharnagel, and John Nothnagel,
have all employed the same homely emblem--a nail; the German name of
which, _Nagel_, ente