o incredibly low, in these days, that I really cannot
venture to quote them. The picture was sent home; the nobleman or
gentleman (almost always an amiable and a hospitable man) would ask the
artist to his house and introduce him to the distinguished individuals
who frequented it; but would never admit his picture, on terms of
equality, into the society even of the second-rate Old Masters. His work
was hung up in any out-of-the-way corner of the gallery that could be
found; it had been bought under protest; it was admitted by sufferance;
its freshness and brightness damaged it terribly by contrast with the
dirtiness and the dinginess of its elderly predecessors; and its only
points selected for praise were those in which it most nearly resembled
the peculiar mannerism of some Old Master, not those in which it
resembled the characteristics of the old mistress--Nature.

The unfortunate artist had no court of appeal that he could turn to.
Nobody beneath the nobleman, or the gentleman of ancient lineage, so
much as thought of buying a modern picture. Nobody dared to whisper that
the Art of painting had in anywise been improved or worthily enlarged in
its sphere by any modern professors. For one nobleman who was ready
to buy one genuine modern picture at a small price, there were twenty
noblemen ready to buy twenty more than doubtful old pictures at great
prices. The consequence was, that some of the most famous artists of
the English school, whose pictures are now bought at auction sales for
fabulous sums, were then hardly able to make an income. They were a
scrupulously patient and conscientious body of men, who would as soon
have thought of breaking into a house, or equalizing the distribution of
wealth, on the highway, by the simple machinery of a horse and pistol,
as of making Old Masters to order. They sat resignedly in their lonely
studios, surrounded by unsold pictures which have since been covered
again and again with gold and bank-notes by eager buyers at auctions
and show-rooms, whose money has gone into other than the painter's
pockets---who have never dreamed that the painter had the smallest moral
right to a farthing of it. Year after year, these martyrs of the brush
stood, palette in hand, fighting the old battle of individual
merit against contemporary dullness--fighting bravely, patiently,
independently; and leaving to Mr. Pickup and his pupils a complete
monopoly of all the profit which could be extracted, i