ALDA.
I can scarce express the surprise I felt at the time, though it has since diminished on reflection. All the attempts at historical painting were bad, without exception. There was the usual assortment of Virgins, St. Cecilias, Cupids and Psyches, Zephyrs and Floras;—but such incomparable atrocities! There were some cabinet pictures in the same style in which their Flemish ancestors excelled—such as small interior conversation pieces, battle pieces, and flowers and fruit; some of these were really excellent, but the proportion of bad to good was certainly fifty to one.
MEDON.
Something like our own Royal Academy.
ALDA.
No; because with much which was quite as bad, quite as insipid, as coarse in taste, as stupidly presumptuous in attempt, and ridiculous in failure, as ever shocked me on the walls of Somerset House, there was nothing to be compared to the best pictures I have seen there. As I looked and listened to the remarks of the crowd around me, I perceived that the taste for art is even as low in the Netherlands as it is here and elsewhere.
MEDON.
And, surely, not from the want of models, nor from the want of facility in the means of studying them. You visited, of course, Schamp's collection?
ALDA.