The mention of this aged dealer’s name brings back to me recollections. I saw Mr. Halsted in almost the latest of his days, when he was a less prominent but probably a more interesting figure, in the world of Art and Connoisseurship, than he had been in his prime. In his prime, his shop was in Bond Street; but when it was my privilege to go, a humble learner, sitting at the feet of a dealer who had known ‘Mr. Turner,’ and had been for at least one generation surrounded by his work, Halsted, elderly, deliberate of speech, slow and almost halting of movement, large, angular--a craft somewhat difficult to ‘bring round’ or to ‘change the course’ of, within the scanty waters of his back shop--had his abode--his mart at all events--in Rathbone Place, by the French _blanchisseuse de fin_ and a little Swiss _café_. He was half retired; and there in the back shop he would cause you to sit down, in a perfect light under the window, and would show you what you had asked for, if he had it--for, in those days, he bought nothing; he was engaged merely in selling, in the most leisurely of manners, and at prices which were never open to any suggestion of abatement, the remains of his old stock. Standing over you--a little away from you--with something of a soldierly sternness, like a sergeant in a barrack-yard, he rolled out, slowly, story after story of Mr. Turner, of Sir John Hippesley, whom he had influenced to admire the ‘Liber,’ by placing before his eyes a ‘Severn and Wye,’ at breakfast-time, and then of Mr. Turner again. You bought something, of course; but the best of it is, you never were sorry for it afterwards, for Halsted’s eye was faultless: his knowledge, though he was old, was in advance of his day. I cherish as impressions which had received his _imprimatur_--if one may use the word of things he had thought worthy to buy and to sell--an ‘Oakhampton Castle,’ a ‘Hindoo Worshippers,’ and I forget for the moment what else. These two, I remember, bear the stamp of passage through the collection of the famous Mr. Stokes--the first ‘Liber’ collector--and of his niece, Miss Constance Clarke.