n appearance.[25] In fact, there was no one in the room but the
painter himself and his friend Dr. Parsons, Secretary to the Royal
Society. The highest written offer having been declared to be L120, Mr.
Lane, shortly before twelve, said he would "make the pounds guineas,"
but subsequently much to his credit, offered the artist a delay of some
hours to find a better purchaser. An hour passed, and as, up to that
time, no one had appeared, Hogarth, much mortified, surrendered the
pictures to Mr. Lane, who thus became the owner of the artist's best
work, and the finest pictorial satire of the century, for the modest sum
of L126, which included Carlo Marratti frames that had cost Hogarth four
guineas a-piece. Mr. Lane, who readily promised not to sell or clean the
pictures without the knowledge of the painter, left them at his death
to his nephew, Colonel J.F. Cawthorne, by whom they were put up to
auction in March, 1792, but were bought in again for 910 guineas. In
1797 they were sold at Christie's for L1,381 to Mr. John Julius
Angerstein, with the rest of whose collection they were acquired in 1824
for the National Gallery.

_William Hogarth_ (New York and London, 1891).

FOOTNOTES:

[23] "It was reserved to Hogarth to write a scene of furniture. The
rake's levee-room, the nobleman's dining-room, the apartments of the
husband and wife in _Marriage A-la-Mode_, the alderman's parlour, the
poet's bed-chamber, and many others, are the history of the manners of
the age." So says Horace Walpole (_Anecdotes_, etc., 1771, p. 74), and
in this, at least, he was an unimpeachable authority.

[24] The name is added in the print.

[25] Not the "sole bidder," as Allan Cunningham and others have
inferred. If this were so, in "making the pounds guineas," Mr. Lane
would be bidding against himself, a thing which occasionally occurs at
auctions, but is not recommended. We have failed to find any other
account of this transaction than that supplied to Nichols for his second
edition of 1782, pp. 225-7, by Mr. Lane himself, which is summarized
above. Cunningham seems to have derived his information from the same
source; but he strangely transforms it. We can but surmise that he
followed Ireland's transcript, in which the highest bid is given as
L110, instead of L120--a rather unfortunate mistake, for it appears to
have misled a good many people.

THE MADONNA OF THE ROCKS

(_LEONARDO DA VINCI_)

THEOPHILE GAUTIER

The engr