to cozening inclined, may falsify his stock and get the better of you in every deal, and seldom does justice reach him. Often, of course, the detection of these forgeries is anything but a simple matter. The trained expert may be deceived as surely as the veriest amateur, and absolute knowledge in the matter of antiques is probably nowhere to be had. You would certainly not find it in any court of law in Europe. Again, whereas the housewife whose domestic bills are punctually settled will stand very little nonsense from her tradespeople, the man who buys a flint hippopotamus of the twelfth dynasty, pluming himself on his Pharaonic lore, and subsequently finds that the mild Egyptian has done him in the eye, will be disinclined to boast himself a victim. For a hundred reasons, then, this commerce flourishes almost unharmed.

To the seeker of curios it matters little whether he runs over to Paris for a week, drops down to Rome, or adventures into the heart of Persia: the wicked, in the persons of the sellers of new lamps for old, are ever with him. In Persia the air of business is still that of the Arabian Nights. Inspectors, disguised in the hideous sack that the Persian woman wears abroad, go

up and down the bazaars; and for the merchant detected in wiles there is immediate woe. The bastinado is the least of it. M. de Lorey, strolling through the bazaar one day, saw a

butcher strung up at his own door with hooks through his heels, requiting in this uneasy way an attempted deal in damaged meat. But when the purchaser is a mere infidel from European parts, the eye of Persian justice looks another way. No Cadi orders the bastinado for those dealers in the carpets, arms, coins, and antiques in general, that are specially and very astutely for the Feringhee. Persia is perhaps not a whit worse than India. The deeper you dip into the gorgeous East the more extravagantly are you held at fee.

This commerce in the sham antique extends to almost every article that is largely in demand, and to many articles that are not. Build your House Beautiful (the style of which will be inaccurately copied from some other age or country) and fill it with the wonders gathered from the corners of the earth. Arrange your old masters in your picture gallery; hang up your fine tapestries; lay down your carpets from the East; let your cabinets be rich in gems, cameos, miniatures, and medals, and your portfolios in rare engravings; let your bedroom be not one day more modern than Louis Seize; include among the ornaments of your library a few notable bindings and some half-dozen priceless specimens of illumination; scatter a Strad or two in the music-room; and dispose in the hall the arms and weapons of persons who might

well have been your ancestors. Amid this embarrassment of treasures there is perhaps not one absolutely honest piece. All, all the objects in the millionaire's collection can be most exquisitely faked. You have really not a notion how many there are of those flint hippopotami of the twelfth dynasty!

Does your fancy rest perchance on old coins and medals? Many learned connoisseurs have abandoned this hobby altogether, the truth being that there is no getting even with the coiner. No one with a large collection of coins knows exactly what he has got. The counterfeiter, wisdom being precious to him, has left off the foolish practice of melting his coins in a mould. He strikes them from a die. Also he has learned that in days gone by steel dies did not exist; he now makes his of bronze. It is extremely difficult to be even with him. Some one may remember the instructive affair of the beautiful imitations of the Keutschacher Rubentalern of 1504. True specimens of each of these would fetch from twelve to fifteen hundred florins, but who can any longer tell the real from the Brummagem? A certain man got hold of a Keutschacher Rubentaler, and dreamed himself forthwith the cashier of the world. In a well-reputed mint, where his designs were not suspected, he succeeded in getting made for him a useful number of imitations of this interesting

thaler. Next he prepared impressions of it in tinfoil, and despatched them to collectors, asking if they had one to sell at 1100 florins. Now there are, perhaps, not six genuine coins of this sort in Christendom, and no connoisseur who was approached had a specimen. The genius waited a while, and wrote again to the same collectors, saying that he had a Keutschacher Rubentaler to offer for 700 florins. In the hope of making 400 florins profit, most of the collectors leaped at the bait. The forger realised the future he had glimpsed, and you could now obtain a Keutschacher Rubentaler almost anywhere-but had better leave it for somebody else. Here, as will be seen, few of the collectors could resist the chance of a stroke of profit at a brother amateur's expense; but was it not long ago declared that no collector could possibly possess a conscience?

You may have a taste for MSS. You would like to own some splendid example of the period of Charlemagne, which revived the art of staining. How many authentic manuscripts of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries are scrupulously preserved in libraries, I know not. The number must be very inconsiderable, but there are artificers who would not for a moment boggle at producing one. Certain documents of the nature of diplomas, written in the Latin tongue, are probably not now forthcoming of a date earlier than the fifth century; but I doubt not

that some able craftsman would fake you such a work to perfection. The industrial arts have advanced so wonderfully in our day that manuscripts are copied with a skill which passes comprehension; and not even in the reproduction of the old impression are there any serious difficulties to overcome. The little mistakes of the manipulators of a past generation would nowadays be avoided. The redoubtable literary forger, Wenzel Hanka, who had no thought of lining his pockets, but wished only to endow his country with a nice treasury of old Slav poems, forgot in the ardour of fabrication that Prussian blue, in which colour he had drawn some letters purporting to be thirteenth century, was not discovered until the beginning of the eighteenth. Yet more egregious was the blunder of the Greek Simonides. This forger, whose motive was not the patriotic one of Hanka, unaccountably overlooked the fact that most animals have eyes in their heads. Working on a parchment derived from the skin of a head, he mistook the eye-holes for natural defects in the material; and instead of skipping or writing around them, he treated his MS. at this point as though the middles of two words had disappeared. Such solecisms we may hope would not mar the performance of any felonious artist of these days. A good magnifying glass, it may be observed-which should be applied to every word and every letter