be very slow in making any acquisition of _price_, from such a suspected source as the cabinet of the antiquary. But if you have unfortunately been made a dupe of--what remedy? That depends, if you have been led to purchase any thing under a false impression of its antiquity; and can _prove_ this. The law itself would step in, in such a case, to repossess you of your purchase-money. If, indeed, the strong and pervading feeling amongst the other _antiquari_, as in an _assize of crows_, were not of itself sufficient to secure the condign punishment of the culprit, which consists in compelling him to refund. But this redress only extends to one particular kind of fraud, that, namely, included under the rhetorical figure called metonymy, (_i.e._ the substitution of one thing for another,) and does not extend beyond this; so that, though a dealer were to sell an old hatchet for one hundred pounds, provided it had the necessary _patina_ upon it to establish its antiquity--this not constituting a case of cheating, (at least, in the antiquarian sense of the term,) but merely one of superior tact--brother-dealers might indeed condole with you in your mistake; but nobody has any right to interfere! When you do buy, you must take nothing for granted but that you will be cheated; and get a written declaration from the dealer, that what he sells you has been paid for, as genuine, on the score of antiquity. There are, too easy purchasers, who rest satisfied with the man's word, (as if a _dealer's_ words were aught but wind, or wind but air,) who always professes to _believe_ that the object he has for sale is of _sacrosanct_ antiquity, and the best of its kind, (if an onyx, for instance, not Oriental only, but _Orientalissimo_,) though he observes, in a sort of moralizing parenthesis, that he will not vouch for what the _ignorant_ or the _malicious_ may _say_. Here you must, we fear, range yourself on the side of malice and ignorance; _non vale niente_, the object is good for nothing; and if you swallow such a bait, you are a _bête_ for your pains. _Amici miei_ of Oxford and Cambridge, excuse the informality of self-introduction; and pray keep your _caution_-money till you have taken your Master-in-Arts degree _abroad_. If you pay it on the initiatory matriculation of a first journey, you may depend upon never getting any of it back; when on having studied anew the "art of self-defence," to protect you against _another_ art, which you must _also_ study, in close connexion with the "_belle arti_," you are become really an adept, and duly qualified for that diploma. Study antiquities in _public_ museums; so shall you learn to appraise at their true value the gauds of dealers, which, if you have not educated your taste into a wholesome fastidiousness, by a diligent study of the _real_ treasures of antiquity, you may chance to find most dangerously attractive--[Greek: mêden enarghes en tê psnchê echontes paradeigma, mêde dunamenoi ôsper