The pictures that were the favourites of great men gain an additional value in our eyes from that fact. Vandyck's _Portrait of Rubens_ (49), Bassano's _Good Samaritan_ (277), and Bourdon's _Return of the Ark_ (64), were all owned and much-prized by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who would often admire, to his Academy pupils, the "poetical style" of the Bourdon. Vandyck himself singled out the _Portrait of Gevartius_ as his masterpiece, and used to "carry it about from court to court and from patron to patron, to show what he could do as a portrait-painter." There is, too, a pretty story of how Sir George Beaumont valued a little landscape by Claude (61), so highly that he made it his travelling companion. He presented it to the National Gallery in 1826; but, unable to bear its loss, begged it back for the rest of his life. He took it with him into the country; and on his death two years later, his widow restored it to the nation. I might go on multiplying picture-stories for ever; for the romance of the National Gallery is inexhaustible. Times, and men, change; we live our little day, and are gone; but here, upon our walls, live souls embodied in canvases, monuments of human spirits which from age to age are still instinct with life. "Paul Veronese," James Smetham writes, "three hundred years ago, painted that bright Alexander, with his handsome flushed Venetian face, and that glowing uniform of the Venetian general which he wears; and before him, on their knees, he set those golden ladies, who are pleading in pink and violet; and there is he, and there are they in our National Gallery; he, flushed and handsome, they, golden and suppliant as ever. It takes an oldish man to remember the comet of 1811. Who remembers Paul Veronese, nine generations since? But not a tint of his thoughts is unfixed; they beam along the walls as fresh as ever. Saint Nicholas stoops to the Angelic Coronation, and the solemn fiddling of the Marriage at Cana is heard along the silent galleries of the Louvre ('Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter')! yes; and will be so when you and I have cleaned our last palette, and, 'in the darkness over us, the four-handed mole shall scrape.'" Paul Veronese and his contemporaries knew how to make their works last. We in our day are not so fortunate. It is sad to think how many pictures of our own English School are gradually fading away; how many men have put their best powers into pictures which are now (among them some of Sir Joshua Reynolds's most beautiful creations) rapidly becoming "ghosts of ghosts." With Turner the general wreck is more complete. "Turner," Constable said, "seems to paint with tinted steam,--so evanescent, and so airy." Alas! evanescent indeed. Reynolds devoted much time and attention to finding out durable pigments. Trying to discover the secret, he even cut up some old Italian pictures. It was a vain quest. The old masters are long ago buried, and they have carried their secret to the grave.