A collector, whose house is permeated with the charm and beauty of eighteenth-century arts and crafts, asked recently my advice as to what he should next begin to collect. I suggested the original pictures of the more accomplished and promising of our younger living painters, a comparatively inexpensive luxury. He shook his head, and, before the evening, a choice William Ward, exceptional in colour, had proved irresistible. Yes, it is a curious and noteworthy fact that the collector of old English colour-prints has rarely, if ever, any sympathy with modern art, however fine, however beautiful. He will frankly admit this, and, while he tells you that he loves colour, you discover that it is only colour which has acquired the mellowing charm of time and old associations. So your colour-print collector will gladly buy a dainty drawing by Downman, delicately tinted on the back, or a pastel by J. R. Smith, somewhat purple, maybe, in the flesh-tints, while the sumptuous colouring of a Brangwyn will rouse in him no desire for possession, a Lavery’s harmonies will stir him not at all, and the mystic beauty of tones in any _Late Moonrise_ that a Clausen may paint will say to him little or nothing. But then, one may ask, why is he content with the simple colour-schemes of these dainty and engaging prints, when the old Japanese, and still older Chinese, colour-prints offer wonderful and beautiful harmonies that no English colour-printer ever dreamt of? And why, if we chance to meet this lover of colour at the National Gallery, do we find him, not revelling joyously in the marvellously rich, luminous tones of a Filippino Lippi, for example, or the glorious hues of a Titian, but quietly happy in front of, say, Morland’s _Inside of a Stable_, or Reynolds’s _Snake in the Grass_?