amateur, you pay the rent of that palace in Bond Street or Fifth Avenue; you pay the salary of the gentlemanly assistant or partner whose time is at your disposal during your too rare visits; you pay the commissions of an army of agents throughout the world; you pay, alas! too often the cost of securing false “sale records” in classic auction rooms; and, finally, it is only too probable that you pay also a heavy secret commission to the disinterested friend who happened to remark there was an uncommonly fine object in Y——­’s gallery.  By a cheerful acquiescence in the suggestions that are daily made to you, you may accumulate old masters as impersonally, as genteelly, let me say, as you do railway bonds.  But, of course, under these circumstances you must not expect bargains.

Now, in objects that are out of the fashion—­a category including always many of the best things—­and if approached in slack times, the great dealers will occasionally afford bargains, but in general the economically minded collector, who is not necessarily the poor one, must intercept his prey before it reaches the capitals.  That it makes all the difference from whom and where you buy, let a recent example attest.  A few years ago a fine Giorgionesque portrait was offered to an American amateur by a famous London dealer.  At $60,000 the refusal was granted for a few days only, subject to cable response.  The photograph was tempting, but the besought amateur, knowing that the authenticity of the average Giorgione is somewhat less certain than, say, the period of the Book of Job, let the opportunity pass.  A few months after learning of this incident, I had the pleasure of meeting in Florence an English amateur who expatiated upon the beauty of a Giorgione that he had just acquired at the very reasonable price of $15,000.  For particulars he referred me to one of the great dealers of Florence.  The portrait, as I already suspected, was the one I had heard of in America.  Forty-five thousand dollars represented the difference between buying it of a Florentine rather than a London dealer.  Of course, the picture itself had never left Florence at all, the limited refusal and the rest were merely part of the usual comedy played between the great dealer and his client.  On the other hand, if the lucky English collector had had the additional good fortune to make his find in an Italian auction room or at a small dealer’s, he would probably have paid little more than $5,000, while the same purchase made of a wholly ignorant dealer or direct from the reduced family who sold this ancestor might have been made for a few hundred francs.  With the seekers obviously lie all the mystery and romance of the pursuit.  The rest surely need not be envied to the sought.  One thinks of Consul J.J.  Jarves gradually getting together that little collection of Italian primitives, at New Haven, which, scorned in his lifetime and actually foreclosed for a trifling debt, is now an object of