The best boon the trustees of the National Gallery can confer upon the nation, is to resign in a body. Surely there is now little to induce them to remain where they are, and as they are. This step would compel the Government to do what they have found it necessary to do in other cases—appoint a paid and responsible minister; and, if it be thought worth while to have a National Gallery at all, to provide liberally the means of obtaining it. It will never do, on every trifling occasion, to have to go to Parliament, and to be met in a huckstering spirit. We must break some of the shackles which the modern utilitarian school is ever imposing; we must learn to view the fine arts as a constitutional part of the liberal arts, which must be treated liberally, if we would have them permanently established. We must now return for a little space to the subject which, in the commencement of this paper, we proposed to discuss: “What are we to collect?” We shall make a great mistake indeed, if we are led by Mr Dyce as an authority, to pass contempt upon either the works of, or the admiration felt for, the genius of the greatest men in art—if we put chronological series in competition with excellence. He overdoes his part, and can gain nothing by such language as this:—“Turgid, unmeaning panegyrics of Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, Titian, Correggio, and the rest.” These “_and the rest_” are such pre-eminently great masters, that, in some shape or other, we would have their works ever before the public. Where we cannot have originals, we would have copies, and the best that either have been made and can be acquired, or that can now be made. We cannot think a gallery perfect without them. We would have a portion set apart especially for copies of the best works, and also for prints. In them we might have the designs, and the light and shade, the great and beautiful ideas represented: and here we cannot but lament, that the perfection to which the art of engraving has been brought should in this country be given up to inferior and almost to worthless things. Our engravings indicate the public taste, the causes of the low state of which we have already remarked upon. If there be really a desire to instruct the public—and without instruction there will not be an encouragement for a better devotion of that beautiful art—let the collecting the best engravings, whether old or new, be a great object with the purveyors of a National Gallery. Nor would we have the grand works to which we allude put away in portfolios, but glazed, and hung upon walls specially appropriated to them. Let us have, at least, good things—the best originals we can procure, and the next best, copies, and engravings of the best; and not waste time and squander means in searching out for chronological histories, the attenuated deformities of the Byzantine schools, the hideous performances of those predecessors in art, who had not yet acquired the knowledge of drawing with any