ny acquisition of _price_, from such a suspected
source as the cabinet of the antiquary. But if you have unfortunately
been made a dupe of--what remedy? That depends, if you have been led to
purchase any thing under a false impression of its antiquity; and can
_prove_ this. The law itself would step in, in such a case, to repossess
you of your purchase-money. If, indeed, the strong and pervading feeling
amongst the other _antiquari_, as in an _assize of crows_, were not of
itself sufficient to secure the condign punishment of the culprit, which
consists in compelling him to refund. But this redress only extends to
one particular kind of fraud, that, namely, included under the
rhetorical figure called metonymy, (_i.e._ the substitution of one thing
for another,) and does not extend beyond this; so that, though a dealer
were to sell an old hatchet for one hundred pounds, provided it had the
necessary _patina_ upon it to establish its antiquity--this not
constituting a case of cheating, (at least, in the antiquarian sense of
the term,) but merely one of superior tact--brother-dealers might
indeed condole with you in your mistake; but nobody has any right to
interfere!

When you do buy, you must take nothing for granted but that you will be
cheated; and get a written declaration from the dealer, that what he
sells you has been paid for, as genuine, on the score of antiquity.
There are, too easy purchasers, who rest satisfied with the man's word,
(as if a _dealer's_ words were aught but wind, or wind but air,) who
always professes to _believe_ that the object he has for sale is of
_sacrosanct_ antiquity, and the best of its kind, (if an onyx, for
instance, not Oriental only, but _Orientalissimo_,) though he observes,
in a sort of moralizing parenthesis, that he will not vouch for what the
_ignorant_ or the _malicious_ may _say_. Here you must, we fear, range
yourself on the side of malice and ignorance; _non vale niente_, the
object is good for nothing; and if you swallow such a bait, you are a
_bete_ for your pains. _Amici miei_ of Oxford and Cambridge, excuse the
informality of self-introduction; and pray keep your _caution_-money
till you have taken your Master-in-Arts degree _abroad_. If you pay it
on the initiatory matriculation of a first journey, you may depend upon
never getting any of it back; when on having studied anew the "art of
self-defence," to protect you against _another_ art, which you must
_also_ study, in