HROUGHOUTthe history of art, or rather the history of collecting, there has always been, in conjunction with the desire to collect, a hesitancy in collecting just those things which are ever with us and about which we know the most. Though tremendously characteristic of our age, this hesitancy is by no means confined to it. The Japanese print was ever despised in Japan, and still is, except from its pecuniary point of view, by that grossly over-rated, so-called clever people, who only learned to appreciate their own prints when taught to by the despised western barbarian; the etching of Rembrandt, until the dealer discovered its value, could mostly be obtained for a song; the mezzotint, when it was published, filled the place of the photograph, brought only a guinea, or so, though the near-as-possible counterfeit now is announced to be sold as a rarity in limited editions at the price of the original; the etching of Méryon, valued to-day as much for the paper it is printed on as for what is printed on the paper, was sold by the artist for a few francs, in several cases quite its full value-all these things and endless more are the sport of the collector. And yet it has always seemed to me extraordinary that the collector, who prizes works of the graphic arts mainly for their rarity, has never collected those which really are rare. It is inconceivable, it is astonishing and unbelievable, that the art of the nineteenth century, the art of illustration, has been so neglected that the original drawings, though they have been always with us, have never yet been properly prized, appreciated, catalogued and collected. I know that old drawings are col

lected, but the collector's interest in them to a great extent dates only from yesterday, and even now their price does not equal that of prints from them, of which there may be dozens, or, in fact, nobody knows how many examples in existence. But I also know that, within the last hundred years, drawings, illustrations, have been made in England and America that will rank with any, ever made anywhere, in any age, and that these works of art are absolutely ignored. And they are ignored simply because they have not been collected, because in this country the British museum cannot purchase the work of living British artists, and often it is during the lifetime. of the artist only that they can be secured, because in France there is no place to exhibit drawings save in a corner of the Luxembourg; the rest the French government possesses are buried in the Cabinet des estampes. Theoretically, the rule of the British museum may be a good one; it may be thought a safeguard against as terrible a hodge-podge as that presented on the walls of the art gallery at South KensingTo some of us, however, a remedy suggests itself-change or modify the rule, and, under intelligent direction, there is no reason why collections as fine as those in Dresden and Berlin should not be easily obtained even in England. The consequence of this neglect, both deliberate and enforced on the part of the British government, has been that here dealers and collectors, connoisseurs and amateurs, have avoided original drawings almost altogether. Artists alone have cared for them, have collected them, and still own almost all that are best worth having.' But now

ton.

1 The collections of drawings recently secured by Birmingham and Adelaide were both made by artists.