you first recommended me. This meeting was very agreeable to me,
and I believe not displeasing to him. He enquired into the nature of my
journey to Paris, and informed me of his own business there, which was
to collect pictures, medals, intaglios, and antiques of all kinds, for a
gentleman in London, who had just stept into taste and a large fortune.
I was the more surprised at seeing our cousin pitched upon for this
office, as he himself had often assured me he knew nothing of the
matter. Upon my asking how he had been taught the art of a connoscento
so very suddenly, he assured me that nothing was more easy. The whole
secret consisted in a strict adherence to two rules: the one always
to observe, that the picture might have been better if the painter had
taken more pains; and the other, to praise the works of Pietro Perugino.
But, says he, as I once taught you how to be an author in London, I'll
now undertake to instruct you in the art of picture buying at Paris.

'With this proposal I very readily closed, as it was a living, and now
all my ambition was to live. I went therefore to his lodgings, improved
my dress by his assistance, and after some time, accompanied him to
auctions of pictures, where the English gentry were expected to be
purchasers. I was not a little surprised at his intimacy with people
of the best fashion, who referred themselves to his judgment upon every
picture or medal, as to an unerring standard of taste. He made very good
use of my assistance upon these occasions; for when asked his opinion,
he would gravely take me aside, and ask mine, shrug, look wise, return,
and assure the company, that he could give no opinion upon an affair
of so much importance. Yet there was sometimes an occasion for a more
supported assurance. I remember to have seen him, after giving his
opinion that the colouring of a picture was not mellow enough, very
deliberately take a brush with brown varnish, that was accidentally
lying by, and rub it over the piece with great composure before all the
company, and then ask if he had not improved the tints.

'When he had finished his commission in Paris, he left me strongly
recommended to several men of distinction, as a person very proper for a
travelling tutor; and after some time I was employed in that capacity by
a gentleman who brought his ward to Paris, in order to set him forward
on his tour through Europe. I was to be the young gentleman's governor,
but with a proviso t