No sooner have you entered the Gallery than you are presented with a catalogue of these paintings, in which the robbers do not blush to avow their robberies. The facetious rascals of the National Institute talk and write of the knavery with as much _sangfroid_ as they take a pinch of snuff. The paintings are styled “Tableaux conquis en Italie, recueillis dans la Lombardie, à Bologne, Cento, Modêne, Parme, Plaisance, Rome, Venise, Vérone, Florence, Turin.” With this register of pillage in your hand, you enter the Gallery containing the spoils of nations, and nearly every picture bears at the bottom an inscription declaring it to be a stolen article. Scarcely a page of the catalogue but contains such proclamations of theft as these: “Ces deux tableaux viennent de la Cathédrale de Plaisance, où ils pendoient aux deux coins du Sanctuaire. Ce tableau est tiré de la galerie de Turin. Ce tableau vient du Palais Pitti. Ce tableau est tiré du Palais Pontifical de Monte Cavallo à Rome. Ce tableau vient du Cabinet du ci-devant Roi de Sardaigne à Turin. Ce tableau, un des meilleurs qu’a produit Paolo Veronese, est tiré de l’église des Réligieuses de St. Zacharin à Venise. Ce tableau vient du maître autel de l’église de San Giorgio à Venise. Ce tableau est tiré de l’église de Santa Maria del Orto à Venise. Ce précieux et magnifique tableau que les artistes regardent comme un des chefs d’œuvres de Titian, le martyre de St. Pierre, vient de l’église San Giovanni e Paolo à Venise. Ce portrait vient du Palais du Prince Breschi à Rome.” There is no end to this catalogue of iniquity, it fills at present three volumes, but much more will be added. I question if the Newgate Calendar for the last 100 years contains altogether a hundredth part of the impudent dexterity in the art of filching which the rogues of the National Institute present to us in these three little syllabuses of Republican iniquity. Englishmen, happily shut out from the view of the sack of the continent by that sea which guards our honest little island, have no adequate idea of the indignant feelings of the wretched inhabitants of the wronged countries which the French armies have plundered. I have visited this gallery of paintings in company with some Italians of distinction; I perceived in their countenances a deep and fixed look of unutterable anguish and regret. Such a look that only the artists of Italy whose expatriated portraits hung around us could delineate.