ate as the
atmospherical gauges of a barometer. He is of course not to be entrapped
by copies or fabrications. He has a shrewd distrust of dealers, and
therefore prefers to buy family pictures or originals directly from
chapels and convents. All Italians have a patriotic pride in getting
rid of trash at the expense of the foreigner. The more common baits to
entrap--by bringing pictures mysteriously boxed, grandly baptized, and
liberally decorated with aristocratic seals and eloquent with
academical certificates, anointed with refined flattery and obsequious
courtesy--having failed, his _Eccellenza_ being too knowing to be
seduced into buying the ostentatiously furbished-up _roba_ of shops,
they set about to accommodate him with originals from first hands.
By substituting old frames for new, dirtying the pictures, and other
ingenious processes familiar to the initiated, and then putting them out
to board in noble villas, antique palaces, or other localities the most
natural for good pictures to be _discovered_ in, spiced with a romance
of decayed family-grandeur,--by employing new agents, and by hints
sagaciously conveyed to the buyer, his curiosity is excited, hopes
raised, and, finally, with much trouble and enhanced expense, he
triumphantly carries off the very pictures which in a shop he could not
be tempted to look at for fear of being caught with chaff, but which
now, from a well-got-up romance, have acquired a peculiar value in
his eyes. Not that this sort of delicate mystification is reserved
exclusively for foreigners. For we have detected in an altar-piece,
borne away as a great prize by an Italian friend from a secluded
little chapel attached to a noble villa in the vicinity of Florence,
a worthless specimen of an old painter, from one of the secret
depositories of the city, which had long been wholly unsalable on any
terms.

Honest dealing exists in Italy, as elsewhere, and there are men whose
statements may safely be received. But let the purchaser be cautious
when led into out-of-the-way places to see newly found originals, and be
slow to give heed to stories of churches being permitted to sell this or
that work of art because they have a _facade_ to repair or an altar to
decorate,--and particularly if there be said anything of an inheritance
to divide, or a sad tale of family distress requiring the sacrifice of
long-cherished treasures, backed up by a well-gotten-up pantomime of
unlockings and lockings, p