he
noblemen of England, to encourage the undertaking, and to enable Boydell
to meet his enormous outlay. The cost of the whole work, from the
commencement, is said to have been about one million pounds sterling;
and although the projector was a wealthy man when he commenced it, he
died soon after its completion, a bankrupt to the amount, it is said, of
L250,000.

After these plates were issued, Boydell petitioned Parliament to allow
him to dispose of his gallery of paintings by a lottery. The petition
was granted, and the whole collection was thus disposed of. One of the
finest of these pictures, King Lear, by Sir Benjamin West, is now in the
Boston Athenaeum.

One fact in relation to these plates gives great value to them. "All the
principal historical characters are genuine portraits of the persons
represented in the play; every picture gallery and old castle in England
was ransacked to furnish these portraits."

BRIEF SKETCH OF A PLAN FOR AN AMERICAN NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART.

Public Galleries of Art are now regarded by the most enlightened men,
and the wisest legislators, as of incalculable benefit to every
civilized country. (See vol. i., page 6, of this work.)
They communicate to the mind, through the eye, "the accumulated wisdom
of ages," relative to every form of beauty, in the most rapid and
captivating manner. If such institutions are important in Europe,
abounding in works of art, how much more so in our country, separated as
it is by the broad Atlantic from the artistic world, which few
comparatively can ever visit: many of our young artists, for the want of
such an institution, are obliged to grope their way in the dark, and to
spend months and years to find out a few simple principles of art.

A distinguished professor, high in public estimation, has declared that
the formation of such an institution in this country, however important
and desirable it may be, is almost hopeless. He founds his opinion on
the difficulty of obtaining the authenticated works of the great
masters, and the enormous prices they now command in Europe. The writer
ventures to declare it as his long cherished opinion that a United
States National Gallery is entirely practicable, as far as all useful
purposes are concerned; and at a tithe of the cost of such institutions
in Europe. In the present state of the Fine Arts in our country, we
should not attempt to emulate European magnificence, but utility. The
"course of empi