ty of a crime. It is
the murder of another man's offspring, and of his name and fame at the
same time. We have heard of a man half a century ago going about the
country to paint new wigs upon the Vandykes. We would have such a
perpetrator bastinadoed on the soles of his feet. "I was present,"
says our author, "at Amsterdam during a dispute between one who had
just sold a landscape for several thousand florins, and the agent who
had made the purchase on commission. The latter required an important
change to be made towards the centre of the picture, which he
contended would be very much improved thereby. It was in vain that the
seller, with whom I agreed in opinion upon the point, persisted in
refusing to repaint a work in such good preservation, and by so great
a master; for the broker closed his lips by protesting, that unless
the demand were complied with, he was instructed to throw up the
bargain." We look with equal horror on buyer and seller. Would not the
latter have sold his father, mother, brothers, sisters, aunts, and
cousins? It has been said that, in compliment to William III., many of
the portraits of the ancestors of the courtiers of the day were
re-painted with aquiline noses. M. de Burtin very justly observes,
that the new touches on old pictures do not preserve their tone, but
he does not give the true reason. He seems to entertain no notion that
pictures were painted with any other vehicle than common oil; and, in
a short discussion upon Van Eyck's discovery, he only shows that he
takes up what others have said, and never himself could have read what
the monk Theophilus really wrote; for, like M. Merimee, he supposes
the monk to say what he never did say. It is only surprising that, in
his numerous cleanings, he did not discover the difference between the
old paint of one date and of another, and how they require different
solvents. There is a chapter upon "the manner of knowing and
appreciating copies," from which the beginner, in collecting, may take
some useful hints. He repeats the well-known anecdote of the copy from
Raffaelle by Andrea del Sarto, which Julio Romano, who had worked upon
the picture, believed to be the original, though assured beforehand by
Vasari that it was a copy. With regard to Rubens, by far the greater
number of pictures said to be by him, are by the hands of his
scholars, to whom he gave the design and outline merely, sometimes
touching up the pictures with his own hand. This