consist of Turners, Ettys, Mulreadies,
Landseers—in short, of all the favourite
masters of the English school. He has a
band of artists, who, for stipends, varying
from a pound to thirty shillings weekly,
produce counterfeits of the works of our
Royal Academicians by the yard or mile.
These have their sale principally on the
Continent, where English pictures (notwithstanding
the doubts sometimes expressed by our
neighbours as to whether we can paint at all)
are eagerly sought after, and a genuine Landseer
is a pearl beyond price. Occasionally,
though very rarely, Mr. Glaze buys original
pictures by unknown artists—Snooks of
Cleveland Street, perhaps, or Tibbs of Cirencester
Place. He gives a few shillings for one—
rarely half-a-sovereign. Then, according to
the genre, or to some faint analogy in style
or colour, the name of some celebrated living
master is, without further ceremony, clapped
on the unresisting canvas, and, as a
Mulready, a Webster, or a Creswick, the daub
goes forth to the world.

Travelling yet through Cawdor Street, we
come upon yet a lower grade of traffickers in
pictures. These ingenious persons devote
themselves to the art of picture-dealing, insomuch
as it affects pawnbroking. They employ
artists (sometimes—daubers more frequently)
to paint pictures, for a low but certain price.
These occasionally they pawn, selling the
tickets subsequently to the unwary for whatever
they will fetch; or, they buy tickets
themselves, and remove them from one
pawnbroker to another, who, in their knavish
experience, gives a better price for pictures.
"My Uncle," however, it must be admitted,
has got rather wary lately with respect to
pictures and picture-pawners. He has been
"done" by apparent noblemen driving up to
his door in carriages and pair, and by the
footman bearing a carefully-veiled picture
into his private office, and telling him that
"my Lord" must have fifty pounds this
evening. He has been surfeited with
pictures, new from the easel, painted by
necessitous artists in their extremity, and known
in the trade as "pot-boilers," So that, now,
he "would rather not" lend you anything on
a picture; and would prefer some more
convertible article—say a flat-iron, or a pair of
boots—to all the Titians or Rembrandts you
could bring him.

You might go on travelling up and down
Cawdor Street for days, and find out some
fresh proof of the deception and duplicity of
this picture-dealing business at every step.
It makes me melancholy to do so. And I
think sometimes that not a few painters, who
have had R.A. appended (and worthily) to
their names, and have dined at the tables of
live Dukes and Duchesses, may have thought
of their old Cawdor Street days with a sort
of tremor. More than one of them, I will
be bound, as he has passed through Cawdor
Street, has recognised an ancient master, or a
modern original, in the painting of which
he had a hand, and a considerable one, too.
Our own Wilkie, we know, had no other
employment for a long time save that of
counterfeiting Tenierses and Ostades; and
he is not the only great painter who has
done grinding-work for the picture-dealers,
and who has travelled wearily and sorrowfully
through Cawdor Street.

Meanwhile,

                       The thane of Cawdor lives,
          A prosperous gentleman!

CHOICE SECRETS.

"LIGHT a room with spermaceti, anoint your
face with the same substance, and you will
seem to all beholders to have the head of a
sperm whale upon your shoulders." "When
you would have men in the house seem to be
without heads: take yellow brimstone with
oil, and put it in a lamp and light it, and set
it in the midst amongst men, and you shall
see a wonder." These are two out of a large
mass of facts which form a compact body of
ancestral wisdom. They lie before us in a
venerable volume, whose grave frontispiece
is adorned with the portraitures of Alexis,
Albertus Magnus, Dr. Reade, Raymond Lully,
Dr. Harvey, Lord Bacon and Dr. John
Weckir. John Weckir, Doctor in Physic,
first compiled the book, and Dr. R. Read
augmented and enlarged it. "A like work
never before was in the English tongue."
It was printed in the year 1661, for Simon
Miller, at the Starre in St. Paul's Church
Yard, and it is entitled, "Eighteen Books of
the Secrets of Art and Nature, being the
Summe and Substance of Naturall Philosophy,
Methodically Digested." The book is one of
considerable size and pretension, written by
wise doctors in the good old time, two
hundred years ago. Let us not be conceited and
harp only on the strings provided to our
fingers in the nineteenth century. For a few
minutes, at least, it will not do us harm to
get a little scientific information from our
ancestors. We shall glean, therefore, some
random facts out of the harvest-field of
Doctors Read and Weckir, selecting, of course,
as most characteristic, those which our
forefathers may call exclusively their own.

The volume opens with scientific information
on the subject of Angels and Devils,
including, of course, the fact that "Witches
kill children, and divers cattle, which we find
by various experience, and by relation of
others that are worthy to be believed. But if
you will say they are mere delusions of the
Devil, whereby he makes foolish women mad
that are entangled by him, that they believe
they do those things which neither they nor
the Devil can do; if we can so avoid it, we
may as well deny anything else, be it never so
evident."—If you deny that, you may deny
anything—is a phrase not yet dead. Applied
two hundred years ago to the experience