pictures, medals, and statues,
was however the fruit of a long residence abroad. We are apt to rail at
continental nations; yet had it not been for the occasional intercourse
with foreign nations, art would have altogether died out among us. To
the 'Grandes Tours,' performed as a matter of course by our young
nobility in the most impressionable period of their lives we owe most of
our noble private collections. Charles I. and Buckingham, renewed, in
their travels in Spain, the efforts previously made by Lord Arundel and
Lord Pembroke, to embellish their country seats. Then came the
Rebellion; and like a mighty rushing river, made a chasm in which much
perished. Art languished in the reign of the second Charles, excepting
in what related to portrait painting. Evelyn stood almost alone in his
then secluded and lovely retirement at Wotton; apart in his undying
exertions still to arrest the Muses ere they quitted for ever English
shores. Then came the deadly frost of William's icy influence. The reign
of Anne was conspicuous more for letters than for art: architecture,
more especially, was vulgarized under Vanbrugh. George I. had no
conception of anything abstract: taste, erudition, science, art, were
like a dead language to his common sense, his vulgar profligacy, and his
personal predilections. Neither George II. nor his queen had an iota of
taste, either in language, conduct, literature, or art. To be vulgar,
was _haut-ton;_ to be refined, to have pursuits that took one from low
party gossip, or heterodox disquisitions upon party, was esteemed odd:
everything original was cramped; everything imaginative was sneered at;
the enthusiasm that is elevated by religion was unphilosophic; the
poetry that is breathed out from the works of genius was not
comprehended.

It was at Houghton, under the roof of that monster palace, that Horace
Walpole indulged that tastes for pictures which he had acquired in
Italy. His chief coadjutor, however, as far as the antiquities of
painting are concerned, was George Vertue, the eminent engraver. Vertue
was a man of modest merit, and was educated merely as an engraver; but,
conscious of talent, studied drawing, which he afterwards applied to
engraving. He was patronised both by the vain Godfrey Kneller and by the
intellectual Lord Somers: yet his works have more fidelity than
elegance, and betray in every line the antiquary rather than the genius.
Vertue was known to be a first-rate authority