August felt quite pleased to have won so much applause, and grew as red as the lady’s shoes with bashful contentment.

“I knew all the Hirschvogel, from old Veit downwards,” said a fat gres de Flandre beer-jug:  “I myself was made at Nuernberg.”  And he bowed to the great stove very politely, taking off his own silver hat—­I mean lid—­with a courtly sweep that he could scarcely have learned from burgomasters.  The stove, however, was silent, and a sickening suspicion (for what is such heart-break as a suspicion of what we love?) came through the mind of August:  Was Hirschvogel only imitation?

“No, no, no, no!” he said to himself, stoutly:  though Hirschvogel never stirred, never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in it!  After all their happy years together, after all the nights of warmth and joy he owed it, should he doubt his own friend and hero, whose gilt lion’s feet he had kissed in his babyhood?  “No, no, no, no!” he said, again, with so much emphasis that the Lady of Meissen looked sharply again at him.

“No,” she said, with pretty disdain; “no, believe me, they may ‘pretend’ forever.  They can never look like us!  They imitate even our marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can they chassent de race.”

“How should they?” said a bronze statuette of Vischer’s “They daub themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to get rusted; but green and rust are not patina; only the ages can give that!”

“And my imitations are all in primary colours, staring colours, hot as the colours of a hostelry’s sign-board!” said the Lady of Meissen, with a shiver.

“Well, there is a gres de Flandre over there, who pretends to be a Hans Kraut, as I am,” said the jug with the silver hat, pointing with his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a corner.  “He has copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to copy us.  Almost he might be mistaken for me.  But yet what a difference there is!  How crude are his blues! how evidently done over the glaze are his black letters!  He has tried to give himself my very twist; but what a lamentable exaggeration of that playful deviation in my lines which in his becomes actual deformity!”

“And look at that,” said the gilt Cordovan leather, with a contemptuous glance at a broad piece of gilded leather spread out on a table.  “They will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and give him my name; but look! I am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin as a film and laid on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de las Gorgias, worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the blessed reign of Ferdinand the Most Christian. His gilding is one part gold to eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and it has been laid on him with a brush—­a brush—­pah! of course he will be as black as a crock in a few years’ time, whilst I am as bright as when I first was made, and, unless I am burnt as my Cordova burnt its heretics, I shall shine on forever.”