The subject was the De Witt
family; and each portrait wore that genuine stamp of truth that left no
question of their resemblance to the Dutch originals.

There were some sea-pieces by Backhuysen, and one by Vanderveldt;
several excellent landscapes; a couple of gallery pictures worthy a
place in the Pitti, together with Danby's Opening of the Sixth Seal. All
together, in fact, this was a collection of no mean pretensions, which
would have been an exceedingly creditable foundation on which to have
raised a national gallery. The sum which it was required Congress should
appropriate to the purchase was forty thousand dollars; and considering
how that assembly is constituted, how little most of its members know or
care about pictures, or of their intrinsic value, and how utterly
unimbued they are with any conception of the moral worth of art to a
young nation, I conceive it very creditable to the body that the motion
was negatived by only two votes.

How could a member from Illinois or Mississippi have justified such an
item in the budget to his constituents? I can fancy a group of good
Jackson men, after reading of an appropriation of forty thousand dollars
for the purchase of twenty pictures, raising their admiring eyes to a
portrait of the General swinging from the signpost, for the painting of
which, with a horse's head into the bargain, the tavern-keeper, Major
Jones, had paid no cent more than fifteen dollars; and then coming back
on the corrupt motives which could induce a vote of a couple of thousand
a-piece for pictures "that could not by any natural means be liker
nature, or more handsomely done, nohow, by any foreigner that ever
fisted a paint-brush."

The attempting Congress was, in truth, a mistake; but I cannot help
thinking that, had a subscription been opened in either of the great
Northern cities, or in New Orleans, for the purpose of founding a State
collection, a much greater sum might have been readily raised; since
there are in each of these cities numbers of wealthy individuals having
the good taste to rightly appreciate the value of such an Institution,
and public spirit enough to have effected the object, had it once
received the impetus. As it is, I could not help regretting that the
opportunity was lost, the pictures being advertised for sale without
reserve, the auction to take place in a few days.

On the 19th we had a grand military ceremony and procession, to receive
and escort to the Bat