Angerstein's Collection was the generous offer of a private citizen--Sir George Beaumont. =Value of the Pictures.=--Sir George's gift, as we shall see from a little story attaching to one of his pictures (61), was not of that which cost him nothing in the giving. The generosity of private donors, which that little story places in so pleasing and even pathetic a light, has been accompanied by public expenditure at once liberal and prudent. The total cost of the collection so far has been about £900,000[7]; at present prices there is little doubt that the pictures so acquired could be sold for several times that sum. It will be seen in the following pages that there have been some bad bargains; but these mostly belong to the period when responsibility was divided, in an undefined way, between the Trustees and the Keeper. The present organisation of the Gallery dates from 1855, when, as the result of several Commissions and Committees, a Treasury Minute was drawn up--appointing a Director to preside over the Gallery, and placing an annual grant of money at his disposal.[8] The curious reader may trace the use of this discretion made by successive Directors in the table of prices given in the final index--a table which would afford material for an instructive history of recent fashions in art. The annual grant has from time to time been supplemented by special grants, of which the most notable were those for the Peel Collection, the Blenheim pictures, the Longford Castle pictures, two new Rembrandts (1674-5), Titian's "Ariosto" (1944), Holbein's "Duchess of Milan" (2475), and Mabuse's "Adoration of the Magi" (2790) respectively. The Peel Collection consisted of seventy-seven pictures. The vote was proposed in the House of Commons on March 20, 1871, and in supporting it the late Sir W. H. Gregory (one of the Trustees of the Gallery) alluded to "the additional interest connected with the collection, for it was the labour of love of one of our greatest English Statesmen, and it was gratifying to see that the taste of the amateur was on a par with the sagacity of the minister, for throughout this large collection there could hardly be named more than two or three pictures which were not of the very highest order of merit." The price paid for this collection, £70,000, was exceedingly moderate.[9] The "princely" price given for the two Blenheim pictures is more open to exception; but if the price was unprecedented, so also was the sale of so superb a Raphael in the present day unprecedented.