The case must for a while rest where it is, and we should have waited with patience the leisure of our now busy Parliament for its resumption, were it not that a very grievous mischief is left in the Blue Book, where it meets with much favour, to be taken up and made the key-note, the first and last principle of every future discussion respecting a national gallery. It might be thought that, after thirty years of its establishment, we should not have now to come to the question, what a national gallery should be. But so it is. There has been as yet no “fixed principle,” we are told, upon which a national collection is to be formed. We have no charge to bring against the trustees on that account; indeed, we rejoice that they had no fixed principle, if by fixed principle is meant such scheme and system as we see pertinaciously and insinuatingly urged upon the public notice in parts of the evidence, and more particularly in the appendix of this voluminous Report. We give our reader credit for good taste and common sense, and doubt not he will think it sufficient that a national gallery should consist of good pictures—the best that are to be had. But no: common sense is too unrefined for this knowledge-age, and good taste is of private purveyorship, and of very little importance in forming a public collection. However absurd this may seem to be, we assure the reader that it is an idea put forth with a good deal of authority, and perhaps no little presumption, on the part of some of its advocates; we see its dressing up into a substantial image of magnitude, and mean to take up the sling and the stone, and do battle with it. There are always a multitude of dilettanti who, loading their memories with names, love to talk with apparent learning about art, and yet have little feeling for its real excellences. To such, a history of art is better than art itself. They would make a national gallery a lumber-house of chronological curiosities. They have a perverse love for system and arrangement: very good things in their proper places, and with moderation, keeping a very subordinate position, not without value in a national gallery; but the value is little indeed, if put in any degree in competition with what should be the great primary aim—to gather together the finest works of the best painters. The chronological arrangement should be the after-thought, arising out of what we possess, not directing the first choice. This whim of the dilettanti school is not new with us. It may be seen in the Report of the Commission of 1836—and is repeated in the present Report.