Let me hasten to add that there are times when everybody must sell.  Collections must periodically be weeded out; one may be hard up and sell his pictures as another in similar case his horses; artists will naturally draw into their studios beautiful objects which, occasion offering, they properly sell.  With these obvious exceptions the line is absolutely sharp.  Did you buy a thing to keep?  Then you are an amateur, though later your convenience or necessity dictates a sale.  Did you buy it to sell?  Then you are a dealer.

The safety of the little collector lies in specialisation, and there, too, lies his surest satisfaction.  To have a well-defined specialty immediately simplifies the quest.  There are many places where one need never go.  Moreover, where nature has provided fair intelligence, one must die very young in order not to die an expert.  As I write I think of D——­, one of the last surviving philosophers.  Born with the instincts of a man of letters, he declined to give himself to the gentler pursuit until he had made a little competence at the law.  As he followed his disinterested course of writing and travel, his enthusiasm centred upon the antiquities of Greece and Rome.  In the engraved gems of that time he found a beautiful epitome of his favourite studies.  For ten years study and collecting have gone patiently hand in hand.  He possesses some fifty classical gems, many of the best Greek period, all rare and interesting from material, subject, or workmanship, and he may have spent as many dollars in the process, but I rather doubt it.  He knows his subject as well as he loves it.  Naturally he is writing a book on intaglios, and it will be a good one.  Meanwhile, if the fancy takes him to visit the site of the Bactrian Empire, he has only to put his collection in his pocket and enjoy it en route.  I cannot too highly commend his example, and yet his course is too austere for many of us.  Has untrammelled curiosity no charms?  Would I, for example, forego my casual kakemonos, my ignorantly acquired majolica, some trifling accumulation of Greek coins, that handful of Eastern rugs?  Could I prune away certain excrescent minor Whistlers? those bits of ivory cutting from old Italy and Japan? those tarnished Tuscan panels?—­in truth, I could and would not.  Yet had I stuck to my first love, prints, I should by this time be mentioned respectfully among the initiated, my name would be found in the card-catalogues of the great dealers, my decease would be looked forward to with resignation by my junior colleagues.  As it is, after twenty years of collecting, and an expenditure shameful in one of my fiscal estate, I have nothing that even courtesy itself could call a collection.  In apology, I may plead only the sting of unchartered curiosity, the adventurous thrill of buying on half or no knowledge, the joy of an instinctive sympathy that, irrespective of boundaries, knows its own when it sees it.  And you austerely single-minded amateurs, you experts that surely shall be, I revere if I may not follow you.