and delight of the lovers of English art; and the pictures of the Vicar and Uncle Toby are among the masterpieces of our English school.  Here in the Hague Gallery is Paul Potter’s pale, eager face, and yonder is the magnificent work by which the young fellow achieved his fame.  How did you, so young, come to paint so well?  What hidden power lay in that weakly lad that enabled him to achieve such a wonderful victory?  Could little Mozart, when he was five years old, tell you how he came to play those wonderful sonatas?  Potter was gone out of the world before he was thirty, but left this prodigy (and I know not how many more specimens of his genius and skill) behind him.  The details of this admirable picture are as curious as the effect is admirable and complete.  The weather being unsettled, and clouds and sunshine in the gusty sky, we saw in our little tour numberless Paul Potters—­the meadows streaked with sunshine and spotted with the cattle, the city twinkling in the distance, the thunderclouds glooming overhead.  Napoleon carried off the picture (vide Murray) amongst the spoils of his bow and spear to decorate his triumph of the Louvre.  If I were a conquering prince, I would have this picture certainly, and the Raphael “Madonna” from Dresden, and the Titian “Assumption” from Venice, and that matchless Rembrandt of the “Dissection.”  The prostrate nations would howl with rage as my gendarmes took off the pictures, nicely packed, and addressed to “Mr. the Director of my Imperial Palace of the Louvre, at Paris.  This side uppermost.”  The Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Italians, &c., should be free to come and visit my capital, and bleat with tears before the pictures torn from their native cities.  Their ambassadors would meekly remonstrate, and with faded grins make allusions to the feeling of despair occasioned by the absence of the beloved works of art.  Bah!  I would offer them a pinch of snuff out of my box as I walked along my gallery, with their Excellencies cringing after me.  Zenobia was a fine woman and a queen, but she had to walk in Aurelian’s triumph.  The procede was peu delicat?  En usez vous, mon cher monsieur! (The marquis says the “Macaba” is delicious.) What a splendor of color there is in that cloud!  What a richness, what a freedom of handling, and what a marvellous precision!  I trod upon your Excellency’s corn?—­a thousand pardons.  His Excellency grins and declares that he rather likes to have his corns trodden on.  Were you ever very angry with Soult—­about that Murillo which we have bought?  The veteran loved that picture because it saved the life of a fellow-creature—­the fellow-creature who hid it, and whom the Duke intended to hang unless the picture was forthcoming.