e is the boldness and courage with which St. Paul
undertook to talk to a set of men who, he knew, despised all the world,
as thinking themselves able to teach them anything. In the audience
there is anticipating pride and conceit in some, a smile or fleer of
contempt in others, but a kind of sensible conviction, though crushed in
its beginning, on the faces of the rest; and all together appear
confounded, but have little to say, and know nothing at all of it; they
gravely put him off to hear him another time; all these are seen here in
the very dress of the face--that is, the very countenances which they
hold while they listen to the new doctrine which the Apostle preached to
a people at that time ignorant of it.

The other of the cartoons are exceeding fine but I mention these as the
particular two which are most lively, which strike the fancy the soonest
at first view. It is reported, but with what truth I know not, that the
late French king offered an hundred thousand _louis d'ors_ for these
pictures; but this, I say, is but a report. The king brought a great
many other fine pieces to England, and with them the love of fine
paintings so universally spread itself among the nobility and persons of
figure all over the kingdom that it is incredible what collections have
been made by English gentlemen since that time, and how all Europe has
been rummaged, as we may say, for pictures to bring over hither, where
for twenty years they yielded the purchasers, such as collected them for
sale, immense profit. But the rates are abated since that, and we begin
to be glutted with the copies and frauds of the Dutch and Flemish
painters who have imposed grossly upon us. But to return to the palace
of Hampton Court. Queen Mary lived not to see it completely finished,
and her death, with the other difficulties of that reign, put a stop to
the works for some time till the king, reviving his good liking of the
place, set them to work again, and it was finished as we see it. But I
have been assured that had the peace continued, and the king lived to
enjoy the continuance of it, his Majesty had resolved to have pulled down
all the remains of the old building (such as the chapel and the large
court within the first gate), and to have built up the whole palace after
the manner of those two fronts already done. In these would have been an
entire set of rooms of state for the receiving and, if need had been,
lodging and entertaining an