d along my gallery, with their
Excellencies cringing after me. Zenobia was a fine woman and a queen,
but she had to walk in Aurelian's triumph. The procede was peu delicat?
En usez vous, mon cher monsieur! (The marquis says the "Macaba" is
delicious.) What a splendor of color there is in that cloud! What a
richness, what a freedom of handling, and what a marvellous precision!
I trod upon your Excellency's corn?--a thousand pardons. His Excellency
grins and declares that he rather likes to have his corns trodden on.
Were you ever very angry with Soult--about that Murillo which we have
bought? The veteran loved that picture because it saved the life of
a fellow-creature--the fellow-creature who hid it, and whom the Duke
intended to hang unless the picture was forthcoming.

We gave several thousand pounds for it--how many thousand? About its
merit is a question of taste which we will not here argue. If you choose
to place Murillo in the first class of painters, founding his claim upon
these Virgin altar-pieces, I am your humble servant. Tom Moore painted
altar-pieces as well as Milton, and warbled Sacred Songs and Loves of
the Angels after his fashion. I wonder did Watteau ever try historical
subjects? And as for Greuze, you know that his heads will fetch 1,000L.,
1,500L., 2,000L.--as much as a Sevres "cabaret" of Rose du Barri. If
cost price is to be your criterion of worth, what shall we say to that
little receipt for 10L. for the copyright of "Paradise Lost," which used
to hang in old Mr. Rogers's room? When living painters, as frequently
happens in our days, see their pictures sold at auctions for four or
five times the sums which they originally received, are they enraged
or elated? A hundred years ago the state of the picture-market was
different: that dreary old Italian stock was much higher than
at present; Rembrandt himself, a close man, was known to be in
difficulties. If ghosts are fond of money still, what a wrath his must
be at the present value of his works!

The Hague Rembrandt is the greatest and grandest of all his pieces to
my mind. Some of the heads are as sweetly and lightly painted as
Gainsborough; the faces not ugly, but delicate and high-bred; the
exquisite gray tones are charming to mark and study; the heads not
plastered, but painted with a free, liquid brush: the result, one of the
great victories won by this consummate chief, and left for the wonder
and delight of succeeding ages.

The humbles