My varied tastes necessarily brought me into relations with many individuals, to whose superior training and experience I have been indebted for much useful information and much entertaining anecdote. I have during too large a proportion of my life played the part of a lounger and a gossip. How much I should have to deduct from my career, if I were to leave out of the reckoning the time spent in curiosity-shops! Spent, yet not wholly wasted; for I hang the fruit to ripen, and it has rendered some of my pages less dull and some of my statements less imperfect than they might have been. Instead of being dependent on book-learning, I have handled the objects, into which I proposed to inquire, and have mixed with the wise men of the West, who had grown up amid them.
At the English agency of Rollin & Feuardent of Paris I have passed, I should think, months in the aggregate. I have had opportunities of examining there antique jewellery, gems, bronzes, porcelain, medals, coins; and there I have met men, who sympathise in my predilections, and whom I have been enabled to emulate only at a distance—Canon Greenwell, Sir John Evans, Mr Murdoch, Mr Montagu, Lord Grantley, and more. I have seen a duke enter the room, hat in hand, to sell a bronze to the firm. I have seen the soi-disant representative of the Gonzagas of Mantua come to arrange a small pecuniary transaction. I have passed on the stair a Turkish gentleman, who might have been mistaken for the Grand Signior, on his way down from turning something or other into currency. It was on those very boards that Ruskin knelt to examine the Cypriot antiquities of Cesnola.
The effect and success of the great Montagu sale, now nearly completed, were rather spoiled by the aim of the late owner at exhaustiveness; and the result was that numerous lots occurred, containing coins in poor state, which had been acquired for the sake of rare mint-marks. They not only fetched, as a rule, little themselves, but exercised an unfavourable influence even on other items, which happened to be in their neighbourhood. If the collection had been restricted to fine examples, the prices would have been much higher. How often and how long will it be necessary to reiterate the warning that coin-fanciers cannot fall into a more serious and costly error than the sacrifice of other considerations to technical minutiæ, which do not strictly concern them in the way of ownership?
Montagu was rather weak or incomplete in British and Saxon, till he bought Addington’s collection en bloc. Mr Whelan mentioned to him one day, that he ought to strengthen himself in this direction, and he spoke of Addington. ‘But,’ said M. ‘he would not sell, would he?’ Whelan asked his leave to put the inquiry; A. agreed; and the price was £7000, on which W. took five per cent., and the vendor made him a present of £100. Montagu subsequently parted with the Scotish portion to Mr Richardson for £2000.
Canon Greenwell most powerfully and favourably impressed me. He was a churchman with the most liberal views and a scholarly archæologist. He was very intimate with Mr Whelan, and stayed with him, when in town. We had good talk over the topics, which interested us in common; but with Mr Whelan himself my intercourse, spreading over many years, has been most regular, as it has been most agreeable and instructive. He was born in the business, and has been largely employed by the British Museum and by the auctioneers as an expert. He of course attended some of the country sales, and his experience could not fail to be singular. I called on his return from Staffordshire. He had been unlucky on a visit to the same neighbourhood; all the world was there, and heavy prices ruled. Undaunted, he made a second attempt, and got an extraordinary haul of cinque cento bronze medals, which went for about 30s. each. The auctioneer knew nothing about them, and Whelan drew up an extempore catalogue, by which they were sold—mainly to him. His principals struck me at first, I confess, as rather laisser aller folks; but while they do not disdain petty traffic, their profits chiefly arise from transactions, where there is a nabobish margin of £1500 or £2000. It comes to what F. S. Ellis used to say, that it is of no use to clear 100 per cent., if the amount is only eighteenpence; nor is it a great deal better to do as Mr Quaritch has ere now done, to lay out nearly £3000 on a volume, keep it a year or two, and then sell it at £25 advance.
Whelan told me a funny story of a Dutch priest, who once smuggled 600 cigars into London. He related the affair to Whelan in this way in his broken English. ‘I bring over six hundred cigar. They ask me in English at custom house, “you have any thing to declare?” I shrug the shoulder. They ask me in French same thing. I shrug the shoulder. They ask me in Jarman. I shrug the shoulder. They ask me in Hollands. I do same. Then they hold up board with writing in six language. I shrug the shoulder again. “What devil language,” they say, “do this man talk?” and I go forth on my way.’
A few family portraits and miniatures descended to me by reason of two of my foregoers having been artists; and one of the former, a likeness of Hazlitt in oils by himself, met with a curious adventure. Before the Exhibition of 1851 a sculptor borrowed it of my father on the plea that he desired to execute a bust for that great event; and we lost sight equally of him and it, till I received one day from Mr Frederick Locker a catalogue of a sale at Christie’s, where our long-lost picture formed a lot, against which Locker had placed a mark, to draw my attention. I represented the circumstances to the auctioneers, but finally bought back the property.
I once purchased a couple of Richard Wilson landscapes in the original frames, with the painter’s initials and the date 1755; and I have dabbled a little in water colours. But, on the whole, I have been only an onlooker, with an hereditary feeling for art and a consciousness of total incapacity for it.
I was at Althorp in 1868, just when Lord Spencer had acquired the portrait by Sir Joshua of Richard Burke for £100; and I happened to be in conversation with Mr Christie-Miller at St James’s Place, when some one delivered at the door as a present (I believe) an original drawing of the Right Honourable Thomas Grenville.
Without being aware that the National Portrait Gallery possessed the real likeness of Charles Lamb by Hazlitt, which had been purchased for £105, I was led a few years since to go to Hodgson’s rooms in Chancery Lane by the entry in a catalogue of what was alleged to be the Lamb painting. My father approved, subject to my opinion, of the purchase at £50 or so. I at once dismissed the notion of bidding, because I felt sure, that there was something wrong; and the late Mr Macmillan became its possessor at £60. A visit to South Kensington and an interview with the curator of the Gallery, where I beheld the fine, if rather bizarre, work itself, confirmed my judgment and my distrust.