Salvator Rosa's confidence in his own powers was as frankly confessed as it was justified by success. Happening one day to be found by a friend in Florence, in the act of modulating on a very indifferent old harpsichord, he was asked how he could keep such an instrument in his house. "Why," said his friend, "it is not worth a scudo." "I will wager what you please," said Salvator, "that it shall be worth a thousand before you see it again." A bet was made, and Rosa immediately painted a landscape with figures on the lid, which was not only sold for a thousand scudi, but was esteemed a capital performance. On one end of the harpsichord he also painted a skull and music-books. Both these pictures were exhibited in the year 1823 at the British Institution. RARE PORTRAIT BY SALVATOR ROSA. While Salvator Rosa was on a visit to Florence, and refused all applications for his pictures he was accidentally taken in to paint what he so rarely condescended to do a portrait. There lived in Florence a good old dame of the name of Anna Gaetano, of some celebrity for keeping a notable inn, over the door of which was inscribed in large letters, "Al buon vino non bisogna fruscia" (good wine needs no bush). But it was not the good wines alone of Madonna Anna that drew to her house some of the most distinguished men of Florence, and made it particularly the resort of the Cavaliere Oltramontani--her humor was as racy as her wine; and many of the men of wit and pleasure about town were in the habit of lounging in the Sala Commune of Dame Gaetano, merely for the pleasure of drawing her out. Among these were Lorenzo Lippi and Salvator Rosa; and, although this Tuscan Dame Quickly was in her seventieth year, hideously ugly, and grotesquely dressed, yet she was so far from esteeming her age an "antidote to the tender passion," that she distinguished Salvator Rosa by a preference, which deemed itself not altogether hopeless of return. Emboldened by his familiarity and condescension, she had the vanity to solicit him to paint her portrait, "that she might," she said, "reach posterity by the hand of the greatest master of the age."