He died in the belief that he should one day publish an unique work on painting and painters:  such was the aim of his existence, and his study must have been even more curious than the wonderfully crammed, small house at Islington, where William Upcott, the ‘Old Mortality’ in his line, who saved from the housemaid’s fire-lighting designs the MSS.  Of Evelyn’s

Life and Letters, which he found tossing about in the old gallery at Wotton, near Dorking, passed his days.  Like Upcott, like Palissy, Vertue lived and died under the influence of one isolated aim, effort, and hope.

In these men, the cherished and amiable monomania of gifted minds was realized.  Upcott had every possible autograph from every known hand in his collection:  Palissy succeeded in making glazed china; but Vertue left his ore to the hands of others to work out into shape, and the man who moulded his crude materials was Horace Walpole, and Vertue’s forty volumes were shaped into a readable work, as curious and accurate in facts as it is flippant and prejudiced in style and opinions.

Walpole’s ‘Anecdotes of Painting’ are the foundation of all our small amount of knowledge as to what England has done formerly to encourage art.

One may fancy the modest, ingenious George Vertue arranging first, and then making a catalogue of the Houghton Gallery; Horace, a boy still, in looks,—­with a somewhat chubby face, admiring and following:  Sir Robert, in a cocked hat, edged with silver lace, a curled short wig, a loose coat, also edged with silver lace, and with a half humorous expression on his vulgar countenance, watching them at intervals, as they paraded through the hall, a large square space, adorned with bas-reliefs and busts, and containing a bronze copy of the Laocoon, for which Sir Robert (or rather we English) paid a thousand pounds; or they might be seen hopping speedily through the ground-floor apartments where there could be little to arrest the footsteps of the mediaeval-minded Vertue.  Who but a courtier could give one glance at a portrait of George I., though by Kneller?  Who that was a courtier in that house would pause to look at the resemblance, also by Kneller, of the short-lived, ill-used Catherine Shorter, the Premier’s first wife—­even though he still endured it in his bed-room? a mute reproach for his neglect and misconduct.  So let us hasten to the yellow dining-room where presently we may admire the works of Titian, Guido, Vanderwerf, and last, not least, eleven portraits by Vandyck, of the Wharton family, which Sir Robert bought at the sale of the spendthrift Duke of Wharton.

Then let us glance at the saloon, famed for the four large ’Market Pieces,’ as they were called, by Rubens and Snyders:  let us lounge into what were called the Carlo Maratti and the Vandyck rooms; step we also into the green velvet bed-chamber, the tapestry-room, the worked bed chamber; then comes another dining-room:  in short, we are lost in wonder at this noble collection, which cost L40,000.