Some part of the damage done to them may have been due to wear and tear in the artist’s own studio, for it is possible that he employed an assistant or two; though if that had been the case, it is strange that there is no record among the State papers of a licence granting him leave to employ journeymen, such as was necessary under the Act dealing with foreign residents. It is possible, too, though far from probable, that he may have had one or two pupils—though here again there is no record of them—who would copy his drawings, and might be entrusted occasionally with the tracing of the drawings upon the panel, or even in painting parts of the replicas of portraits which must sometimes have been ordered. It is evident that these drawings were made solely for the artist’s own purposes, both in order to avoid a too frequent attendance of his sitters at his studio, and also because it was the method of working which best suited him. They remained, therefore, in his own possession, and were never handed over to his patrons. The fashion of collecting portraits of celebrities which was in vogue in France throughout the sixteenth century was only imitated in a very minor degree in England. In France, as M. Dimier points out, “the result of this rage for portraits was that people were not content with the necessarily limited number of originals. The works of the masters of the time were copied and recopied a hundred times, often by unskilful and sometimes by absolutely clumsy hands. This was the case not only with the portraits of kings and queens, which have been multiplied thus in all ages, but with those of any one at court—a feature which is peculiar to the period under consideration. Not even the number of painted portraits and painted copies was enough; there was a demand for quicker and cheaper satisfaction. The original chalk-drawings were copied, in the same medium, an infinite number of times, far oftener, indeed, than the paintings; and these drawings were commonly bound into albums and preserved as family treasures. A vast number of these albums must have perished, but a vast number still exist.”[578] Nothing of this kind occurred on this side of the Channel. Holbein’s original drawings, after his death, were preserved in a volume in this fashion, but they formed an unique example. Though copies or duplicates of one or two of them exist, such as the John Fisher and the Duchess of Suffolk in the British Museum, the Guldeford, Fisher and Poyntz formerly in the Heseltine Collection, and the head called Sir Charles Wingfield in the collection of Sir John Leslie, Bart., recently published by Mr. Lionel Cust,[579] the collection as a whole was never copied in this way, as it would have been in France. It is doubtful if most of these duplicates, fine as they are, are actually from Holbein’s own hand. Footnote 578: Dimier, _French Painting in the Sixteenth Century_, p. 29. Footnote 579: