According to the views which are now officially accepted by the National Gallery, the persons of this picture are two French Catholics. The one at our left is Jean de Dinteville, Seigneur of Polisy, Bailly of Troyes and Knight of the French Order of St. Michael, of which he wears the badge without the splendid collar--as was permitted, by a special statute, to persons in the field, on a journey, or in a privacy that would not require the full dress of a state occasion. Jean de Dinteville was French Ambassador at the Court of Henry VIII. in 1533; born in 1504, he was then twenty-nine. He died in 1555. The man in the scholar's cap and gown is George de Selve, privately associated with de Dinteville's mission for a few weeks in the spring of 1533. He was born in 1508, nominated Bishop of Lavaur in 1526, and confirmed in that office in 1529, in which year he was French Ambassador at the Court of Charles V. He was twenty-five in 1533, and died in 1541. For myself, holding convictions concerning these portraits utterly at variance with any published opinions--and that in more than one vital respect--I am compelled to limit my account to the bare record of its appearance and catalogued description, until prepared to submit other facts and conclusions to a verdict. Two portraits in the Hague Gallery, each with a falcon hooded on the wrist, show to how much purpose Holbein had studied these birds in the Steelyard. The one of Robert Cheseman, done in this year, is especially fine, with a strange, elusive suggestion of something kindred in the nature of man and bird. In 1533, also, the Steelyard placed its contribution to the celebration of Anne Boleyn's coronation in the painter's hands. And the result was, as Stow tells us, "a costly and marvellous cunning pageant by the merchants of the Stilyard, wherein was the Mount Parnassus, with the Fountaine of Helicon, which was of white marble; and four streams without pipe did rise an ell high and mette together in a little cup above the fountaine; which fountaine ran abundantly with Rhenish wine till night. On the mountaine sat Apollo, and at his feet sat Calliope; and on every side of the mountaine sate four Muses, playing on severell sweet instruments." But of more importance to his living fame were the two large oil paintings--the Triumph of Riches and the Triumph of Poverty--which he executed for the Hall of the Steelyard. In their day they were renowned far and wide; but they also have slipped into some abyss of oblivion, perhaps to be yet recovered as miraculously as was the Solothurn Madonna. When the Guild was compelled to abandon the Steelyard, in Queen Elizabeth's reign, the Hall stood so long unguarded and uncared for that when it regained possession, under James I., everything was in a sad state of neglect. And when the association finally dissolved not long after, the Hanseatic League agreed to present these paintings to Henry Prince of Wales, known, like Charles I., to be a lover of Art.