n their line
of business, from the feebly-buttoned pocket of the patron, and the
inexhaustible credulity of the connoisseur.

Now all this is changed. Traders and makers of all kinds of commodities
have effected a revolution in the picture-world, never dreamed of by the
noblemen and gentlemen of ancient lineage, and consistently protested
against to this day by the very few of them who still remain alive.

The daring innovators started with the new notion of buying a picture
which they themselves could admire and appreciate, and for the
genuineness of which the artist was still living to vouch. These
rough and ready customers were not to be led by rules or frightened by
precedents; they were not to be easily imposed upon, for the article
they wanted was not to be easily counterfeited. Sturdily holding to
their own opinions, they thought incessant repetitions of Saints,
Martyrs, and Holy Families, monotonous and uninteresting--and said so.
They thought little pictures of ugly Dutch women scouring pots, and
drunken Dutchmen playing cards, dirty and dear at the price--and said
so. They saw that trees were green in nature, and brown in the Old
Masters, and they thought the latter color not an improvement on
the former--and said so. They wanted interesting subjects; variety,
resemblance to nature; genuineness of the article, and fresh paint;
they had no ancestors whose feelings, as founders of galleries, it was
necessary to consult; no critical gentlemen and writers of valuable
works to snub them when they were in spirits; nothing to lead them by
the nose but their own shrewdness, their own interests, and their own
tastes--so they turned their backs valiantly on the Old Masters, and
marched off in a body to the living men.

From that time good modern pictures have risen in the scale. Even as
articles of commerce and safe investments for money, they have now (as
some disinterested collectors who dine at certain annual dinners I know
of, can testify) distanced the old pictures in the race. The modern
painters who have survived the brunt of the battle, have lived to see
pictures for which they once asked hundreds, selling for thousands, and
the young generation making incomes by the brush in one year, which
it would have cost the old heroes of the easel ten to accumulate. The
posterity of Mr. Pickup still do a tolerable stroke of business (making
bright modern masters for the market which is glutted with the dingy old
materi