look like us! They imitate even our
marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can they
_chassent de race_."

"How should they?" said a bronze statuette of Vischer's "They daub
themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to get rusted;
but green and rust are not _patina_; only the ages can give that!"

"And _my_ imitations are all in primary colours, staring colours, hot
as the colours of a hostelry's sign-board!" said the Lady of Meissen,
with a shiver.

"Well, there is a _gres de Flandre_ over there, who pretends to be a
Hans Kraut, as I am," said the jug with the silver hat, pointing with
his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a corner. "He has
copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to copy us. Almost he
might be mistaken for me. But yet what a difference there is! How
crude are his blues! how evidently done over the glaze are his black
letters! He has tried to give himself my very twist; but what a
lamentable exaggeration of that playful deviation in my lines which in
his becomes actual deformity!"

"And look at that," said the gilt Cordovan leather, with a
contemptuous glance at a broad piece of gilded leather spread out on a
table. "They will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and give him my
name; but look! _I_ am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin as a film
and laid on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de las Gorgias,
worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the blessed reign of Ferdinand
the Most Christian. _His_ gilding is one part gold to eleven other
parts of brass and rubbish, and it has been laid on him with a
brush--_a brush_--pah! of course he will be as black as a crock in a
few years' time, whilst I am as bright as when I first was made, and,
unless I am burnt as my Cordova burnt its heretics, I shall shine on
forever."

"They carve pear-wood because it is so soft, and dye it brown, and
call it _me_" said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle.

"That is not so painful; it does not vulgarise you so much as the cups
they paint to-day and christen after _me_," said a Carl Theodor cup
subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel.

"Nothing can be so annoying as to see common gimcracks aping _me_,"
interposed the princess in the pink shoes.

"They even steal my motto, though it is Scripture," said a
_Trauerkrug_ of Regensburg in black-and-white.

"And my own dots they put on plain English china creatures!" sighed
the little white maid of Nymphenburg.

"An