"How should they?" said a bronze statuette of Vischer's. "They daub themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to get rusted; but green and rust are not patina; only the ages can give that!" "And MY imitations are all in primary colors, staring colors, hot as the colors of a hostelry's signboard!" said the Lady of Meissen, with a shiver. "Well, there is a gres de Flandre over there, who pretends to be a Hans Kraut, as I am," said the jug with the silver hat, pointing with his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a corner. "He has copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to copy us. Almost he might be mistaken for me. But yet what a difference there is! How crude are his blues! how evidently done over the glaze are his black letters! He has tried to give himself my very twist; but what a lamentable exaggeration of that playful deviation in my lines which in his becomes actual deformity!" "And look at that," said the gilt Cordovan leather, with a contemptuous glance at a broad piece of gilded leather spread out on a table. "They will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and give him my name; but look! _I_ am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin as a film and laid on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de las Gorgias, worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the blessed reign of Ferdinand the Most Christian. HIS gilding is one part gold to eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and it has been laid on him with a brush--A BRUSH!--pah! of course he will be as black as a crock in a few years' time, whilst I am as bright as when I first was made, and, unless I am burnt as my Cordova burnt its heretics, I shall shine on forever." "They carve pear wood because it is so soft, and dye it brown, and call it ME!" said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle. "That is not so painful; it does not vulgarize you so much as the cups they paint to-day and christen after ME!" said a Carl Theodor cup subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel. "Nothing can be so annoying as to see common gimcracks aping ME!" interposed the princess in the pink shoes. "They even steal my motto, though it is Scripture," said a Trauerkrug of Regensburg in black-and-white. "And my own dots they put on plain English china creatures!" sighed the little white maid of Nymphenburg. "And they sell hundreds and thousands of common china plates, calling them after me, and baking my saints and my legends in a muffle of to-day; it is blasphemy!" said a stout plate of Gubbio, which in its year of birth had seen the face of Maestro Giorgio. "That is what is so terrible in these bric-a-brac places," said the princess of Meissen. "It brings one in contact with such low, imitative creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless under glass at the Louvre or South Kensington."