favour of those who have his works to sell. He
was an Englishman, born in 1801, a pupil of
Gros, deceased in 1828. Had his life been
spared a decade longer, he needed to have been
a busy man to brush over all the canvases now
sold as his. Anything authentically his brings
prices that would have been an astonishing
comfort to the young artist. But critics had
not then discovered, and amateurs had not been
taught, that his worst sketches are better worth
than he was recompensed for his finished efforts.
You will have heard the story of Wiertz, the
eccentric Belgian genius? It is said to be true;
it is at least characteristic. His Death of
Patroclus was refused admission to a certain
exhibition one year, he not having then
conquered reputation. To the next annual exhibition
he sent in his own name a Rubens, which,
by singular accident, was little known, and
which the keen-eyed jury of examiners sternly
sat on with the expected verdict of, Get thee
behind me and not into our salon. One is
constantly reminded of that refusal, by the wise
heads of Leipsic University in 1661, of his
doctoral degree to a young candidate, whose
thesis read on that occasion now holds honoured
place in all complete editions of the works of
Leibnitz. Another Belgian, Gallait, was high
content to receive for his first exhibited picture,
in 1835, the sum of eighteen hundred francs.
It has passed through various hands since,
growing in estimation as it went, till it fell a
few years ago into those of a Demidoff, who was
also high content with his acquisition at twenty
thousand francs. I think, without being sure,
that the same is one of the seventeen choice
pictures of the second of the Demidoff sales
this year. It was carried off from other active
competitors by the Marquis of Hertford for one
hundred and fifty-five thousand francs. At the
Houdelot sale, in 1857, was a little Chardin,
bought by the Duke (then Count) de Morny—
who, by the way, is a finely instinctive, as well
as cultivated, virtuoso, besides being an
ingenious playwright, a clever statesman, and a most
successful man of business— bought, I say, the
little Chardin for four thousand five hundred
francs. M. Michel, who was present, whispered
my by-sitting friend L., that he had once sold
the identical Chardin for five hundred francs.
Now everybody at the Hotel who knows the
père Michel— and every frequent body there
does know him— knows that it is not in his
nature or line ever to sell without handsome
profit. At the Hope sale, in 1858, the gem
was a Hobbema, which went under the hammer
at forty-three thousand francs. It was not so
large, perhaps not so complete, a specimen of
that unrivalled landscapist, though more pleasing
than the one of the famous Patureau sale of a
preceding season, which was bought by a Berlin
banker for a hundred thousand francs— his most
profitable investment, if a constant income of
refined pleasure, the endless joy that emanates
from a thing of such beauty, can balance money
dividends. They were both cheap, and neither
could be had to-day, if freshly offered in the
Rue Drouet, for the same sums with accrued
interest.

And here is fame for you. It is only in quite
latter days that we have come to know that
Meindert Hobbema was a contemporary of
Ruysdael, to whom his works, despite notable
distinctive qualities, were used to be attributed
by connoisseurs in their vanity of possession,
and " assigned" by unscrupulous traders in
their greed for gain. In the two hundred and
twenty catalogues of sales that occurred in
Holland from 1684 to 1738, edited by Hoet, his
name does not once appear. The teacher other
than Nature herself, the nationality, the poor
skeleton dates even of birth and death of this
magic master of earth and air and heaven's
boundless light, we are mainly in the dark
about. It would seem probable, from the small
number left us of his works, and from the few
traces of his life, that he died young, " before
his shadow lay long on the earth in the setting
sun." As did Paul Potter and Bonnington at
twenty-eight, Brauwer at thirty-two, Gericault
at thirty-three, Giorgione at thirty-four, Ruysdael,
Parmesan, and Watteau at thirty-seven,
Corregio and Caravaggio at forty, Van Dyke
and Del Sarto at forty-two, Cuyp at forty-three.
Not, my dear young Green Lake, unappreciated
modest hope of the new school, that your
discoloured fancy should draw from this necrology
of the early-called fatidic horoscope for self and
further claims on the exhausted interest of
friends. For Titian the Great lived to ninety-
nine, and brave old Michael Angelo to ninety,
Tintoretto and Claude Gelee to eighty-two,
Primataccio and Chardin to eighty, Greuze to
seventy-nine, David to seventy-seven, Poussin
to seventy-one, Paul Gerritzen, the miller's son,
whom we are agreed to call Rembrandt van Ryn,
to sixty-eight, Da Vinci, who was only not one
of the famously great in science because he
was greater in art, to sixty-four, Proudhon and
Rubens, graceful purity and exuberant force, to
sixty-three.

I was saying that Hobbemas used sometimes
to be signed Ruysdael. It is far more usual
now-a-days to put Hobbema, or some other
name in good credit on the art exchange, to
Exyze's canvas. There are adepts in this
peculiar department of what may be literally styled
the literature of art. They are as erudite as
skilful. The majority of amateurs— especially
the fashionable sort, who are the majority—
though they may have or come to have a more
or less sincere love of art for art's sake, are
most superficial, extrinsic connoisseurs. Their
first ordinary question is before venturing to
bid, " Is it signed?" The vendor is able to
answer this question affirmatively oftener than
he otherwise could, thanks to the professional
monogrammatist. This counterfeiter has made
a special study of signatures, not only materially
of their i dottings and t crossings, but historically
of their variations at different epochs. Thus
he knows, and practises in accordance with his
knowledge, that Hobbema signed his large
pieces with christian and family name in full;