in their travels in Spain, the efforts previously made by Lord Arundel and Lord Pembroke, to embellish their country seats.  Then came the Rebellion; and like a mighty rushing river, made a chasm in which much perished.  Art languished in the reign of the second Charles, excepting in what related to portrait painting.  Evelyn stood almost alone in his then secluded and lovely retirement at Wotton; apart in his undying exertions still to arrest the Muses ere they quitted for ever English shores.  Then came the deadly frost of William’s icy influence.  The reign of Anne was conspicuous more for letters than for art:  architecture, more especially, was vulgarized under Vanbrugh.  George I. had no conception of anything abstract:  taste, erudition, science, art, were like a dead language to his common sense, his vulgar profligacy, and his personal predilections.  Neither George II. nor his queen had an iota of taste, either in language, conduct, literature, or art.  To be vulgar, was haut-ton; to be refined, to have pursuits that took one from low party gossip, or heterodox disquisitions upon party, was esteemed odd:  everything original was cramped; everything imaginative was sneered at; the enthusiasm that is elevated by religion was unphilosophic; the poetry that is breathed out from the works of genius was not comprehended.

It was at Houghton, under the roof of that monster palace, that Horace Walpole indulged that tastes for pictures which he had acquired in Italy.  His chief coadjutor, however, as far as the antiquities of painting are concerned, was George Vertue, the eminent engraver.  Vertue was a man of modest merit, and was educated merely as an engraver; but, conscious of talent, studied drawing, which he afterwards applied to engraving.  He was patronised both by the vain Godfrey Kneller and by the intellectual Lord Somers:  yet his works have more fidelity than elegance, and betray in every line the antiquary rather than the genius.  Vertue was known to be a first-rate authority as to the history of a painter; he was admitted and welcomed into every great country house in England; he lived in an atmosphere of vertu; every line a dilettante collector wrote, every word he uttered, was minuted down by him; he visited every collection of rarities; he copied every paper he could find relative to art; registers of wills, and registers of parishes, for births and deaths were his delight; sales his recreation.  He was the ‘Old Mortality’ of pictures in this country.  No wonder that his compilations were barely contained in forty volumes, which he left in manuscript.  Human nature has singular varieties:  here was a man who expended his very existence in gathering up the works of others, and died without giving to the world one of his own.  But Horace Walpole has done him justice.  After Vertue’s death he bought his manuscripts from his widow.  In one of his pocket-books was contained the whole history of this man of one idea:  Vertue began his collection in 1713, and worked at it until his death in 1757, forty-four years.