ote 21: "Dore (Gustave Paul).... He is a great and
marvellous genius--a poet such as a nation produces once
in a thousand years. He is the most imaginative, the
profoundest, the most productive poet that has ever
sprung from the French race."--P. G. HAMERTON, _Fine
Arts Quarterly_.]

[Note 21: "Daubigny (Charles Francois).--If
landscape can be satisfactorily painted without either
drawing or colour--Daubigny is the man to do it."--P. G.
HAMERTON, _Fine Arts Quarterly_.]

[Note 21: "M. Courbet is looked upon as the
representative of Realism in France. The truth is that
Edouard Frere, the Bonheurs, and many others are to the
full as realistic as Courbet but they produce beautiful
pictures.... It is difficult to speak of Courbet,
without losing patience. Everything he touches becomes
unpleasant."--P. G. HAMERTON, _Fine Arts Quarterly_.]

_The Fate of an Anecdote_

_TO THE EDITOR:_

[Sidenote: _New York Tribune_, Sept. 12, 1880]

Sir--In _Scribner's Magazine_ for this month there appears an article
on Mr. Seymour Haden, the eminent surgeon etcher, by a Mr. Hamerton,
and in this article I have stumbled upon a curious statement
concerning, strangely enough, my own affairs, offered pleasantly in
the disguise of an anecdote habitually "narrated" by the Doctor
himself, and printed effectively in inverted commas, as here shown:

... "A parallel anecdote is narrated by Mr. Haden: 'The most exquisite
series of plates which Whistler ever did--his sixteen Thames
subjects--were originally printed by a steel-plate printer, and so
badly that the owner thought the plates were worn out, and sold them
for a small sum in comparison to their real worth. The purchaser took
them to Goulding, the best printer of etchings in England, and it was
found that they were not only perfect, but that they produced
impressions which had never before been approached even by
Delatre.'"

Putting gently aside the question of these plates being superior to
all previous or subsequent work, and dealing merely with facts, I have
to say that they were _not_ "originally printed by a steel-plate
printer"; that the impressions were _not_ so bad that the owner
thought the plate