uld be a curious statistical inquiry how many visitors Hampton
Court has lost since the Cartoons were removed in 1865 to the
South Kensington Museum. Actually, of course, the whole number has
increased, is increasing, and is not going to be diminished. The
query is, How many more there would be now were those eminent bits of
pasteboard--slit up for the guidance of piece-work at a Flemish loom,
tossed after the weavers had done with them into a lumber-room, then
after a century's neglect disinterred by the taste of Rubens and
Charles I., brought to England, their poor frayed and faded fragments
glued together and made the chief decoration of a royal palace--still
in the place assigned them by the munificence and judgment of Charles?
For our part--and we may speak for most Americans--when we heard,
thought or read of Hampton Court, we thought of the Cartoons.
Engravings of them were plenty--much more so than of the palace
itself. Numbers of domestic connoisseurs know Raphael principally as
the painter of the Cartoons.

A few who have not heard of them have heard of Wolsey. The pursy
old cardinal furnishes the surviving one of the two main props of
Hampton's glory. An oddly-assorted pair, indeed--the delicate Italian
painter, without a thought outside of his art, and the bluff English
placeman, avid of nothing but honors and wealth. And the association
of either of them with the spot is comparatively so slight. Wolsey
held the ground for a few years, only by lease, built a mere fraction
of the present edifice, and disappeared from the scene within half a
generation. What it boasts, or boasted, of the other belongs to
the least noted of his works--half a dozen sketches meant for
stuff-patterns, and never intended to be preserved as pictures.
Pictures they are, nevertheless, and all the more valuable and
surprising as manifesting such easy command of hand and faculty, such
a matter-of-course employment of the utmost resources of art on
a production designed to have no continuing existence except as
finished, rendered and given to the world by a "base mechanical," with
no sense of art at all.

[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO WOLSEY'S HALL.]

Royalty, and the great generally, availed themselves of their
opportunities to select the finest locations and stake out the best
claims along these shores. Of elevation there is small choice, a level
surface prevailing. What there is has been generally availed of for
park or palace, with