"_Nos nostraque morti debemur._" Men and pictures suffer from the doctors as well as from time. Pictures, too, are often in the "hand of the spoiler," and are subject, with their owners, to a not very dissimilar quackery of potion and lotion, undergo as many purifications, nor do they escape the knife and scarification; are laid upon their backs, rubbed and scrubbed, skinned, and oftentimes reduced to the very ribs and dead colouring of what they were. It is surprising how great a number of pictures are ruined by the cleaners. We are sorry to read this account of Correggio's celebrated _Notte_. "Even when they do not destroy the picture entirely, they, at all events, leave the most injurious traces behind, depriving it of its transparency and harmony, and much of the effect, rendering it hard, cold, and weak. Of this the admirable 'Night' of Correggio at Dresden presents a very sad example." We look upon the audacious man who dares to repaint upon an old picture unnecessarily, and by wholesale, as guilty of a crime. It is the murder of another man's offspring, and of his name and fame at the same time. We have heard of a man half a century ago going about the country to paint new wigs upon the Vandykes. We would have such a perpetrator bastinadoed on the soles of his feet. "I was present," says our author, "at Amsterdam during a dispute between one who had just sold a landscape for several thousand florins, and the agent who had made the purchase on commission. The latter required an important change to be made towards the centre of the picture, which he contended would be very much improved thereby. It was in vain that the seller, with whom I agreed in opinion upon the point, persisted in refusing to repaint a work in such good preservation, and by so great a master; for the broker closed his lips by protesting, that unless the demand were complied with, he was instructed to throw up the bargain." We look with equal horror on buyer and seller. Would not the latter have sold his father, mother, brothers, sisters, aunts, and cousins? It has been said that, in compliment to William III., many of the portraits of the ancestors of the courtiers of the day were re-painted with aquiline noses. M. de Burtin very justly observes, that the new touches on old pictures do not preserve their tone, but he does not give the true reason. He seems to entertain no notion that pictures were painted with any other vehicle than common oil; and, in a short discussion upon Van Eyck's discovery, he only shows that he takes up what others have said, and never himself could have read what the monk Theophilus really wrote; for, like M. Merimee, he supposes the monk to say what he never did say. It is only surprising that, in his numerous cleanings, he did not discover the difference between the old paint of one date and of another, and how they require different solvents. There is a chapter upon "the manner of knowing and