There were some sea-pieces by Backhuysen, and one by Vanderveldt; several excellent landscapes; a couple of gallery pictures worthy a place in the Pitti, together with Danby's Opening of the Sixth Seal. All together, in fact, this was a collection of no mean pretensions, which would have been an exceedingly creditable foundation on which to have raised a national gallery. The sum which it was required Congress should appropriate to the purchase was forty thousand dollars; and considering how that assembly is constituted, how little most of its members know or care about pictures, or of their intrinsic value, and how utterly unimbued they are with any conception of the moral worth of art to a young nation, I conceive it very creditable to the body that the motion was negatived by only two votes. How could a member from Illinois or Mississippi have justified such an item in the budget to his constituents? I can fancy a group of good Jackson men, after reading of an appropriation of forty thousand dollars for the purchase of twenty pictures, raising their admiring eyes to a portrait of the General swinging from the signpost, for the painting of which, with a horse's head into the bargain, the tavern-keeper, Major Jones, had paid no cent more than fifteen dollars; and then coming back on the corrupt motives which could induce a vote of a couple of thousand a-piece for pictures "that could not by any natural means be liker nature, or more handsomely done, nohow, by any foreigner that ever fisted a paint-brush." The attempting Congress was, in truth, a mistake; but I cannot help thinking that, had a subscription been opened in either of the great Northern cities, or in New Orleans, for the purpose of founding a State collection, a much greater sum might have been readily raised; since there are in each of these cities numbers of wealthy individuals having the good taste to rightly appreciate the value of such an Institution, and public spirit enough to have effected the object, had it once received the impetus. As it is, I could not help regretting that the opportunity was lost, the pictures being advertised for sale without reserve, the auction to take place in a few days. On the 19th we had a grand military ceremony and procession, to receive and escort to the Battery the remains of General Leavensworth, a brave and very popular officer, who died in consequence of the fatigue and privations incurred on the late prairie expedition amongst the tribes of the Missouri. His remains were brought hither by way of the Lakes on the route to the place of sepulture.