Wonderfully small, however, is the amount of sympathy that I am privileged to expect from English collectors of the older type, in my enjoyment of a sometimes faulty, but an often bewitching, school. A score of French prints, some of them recording the high elegance of Watteau, the pleasant gallantry of Baudouin or Lavreince, the sober homeliness and the grave truth of Chardin (whose lessons were Wordsworthian in their way)--these various things, which I shall still venture to cherish, are wont to be ‘sat upon’ by the antiquary; much as a certain little table-case of Battersea enamels, dainty and aglow with colour, like flowers on a wintry day (puce and gold and _rose du Barry_, that no time and no winter fades), is ‘sat upon’ by some of my friends who behold indescribable virtues in every product of Japanese design. We have all of us got our limits--I remember, though, that in France, two of the men most prominent and influential in their love for the artistic work of their own country in its famous ‘_Dix-Huitième_,’ had been almost the first to welcome the inventions of the Japanese. These men were Philippe Burty and Edmond de Goncourt--but then it is lamentably true that they ignored Rembrandt and Dürer, as far as any practical interest in them was concerned. The mention of the Frenchmen brings me once more face to face with two striking personalities. Burty was a critic in journalism, and an _Inspecteur des Beaux Arts_ besides--an enthusiast, a connoisseur, a real _curieux_. When I knew him he had already done much in France for the popular recognition of Etching. His flat upon an outer boulevard--the Boulevard des Batignolles--told charmingly of the refinement and variety of his tastes. Some _kakemonos_ and _tsubas_ hung on the walls; but here there was an etching, and there an ivory. And he had a little _coin de tapisserie_, as he smilingly said, ‘like Erasmus at the Louvre’--he was thinking of the background of Holbein’s picture. In his deep French bookcases, well-bound volumes were ranged, a second row behind the first, and when the glass doors were opened and a few vacant places discovered, Burty’s favourite cat--the cat of the literary man, moving with quietude, treading with grace--curved about in the bookcase, sleek and smooth, harmless, careful, almost appreciative.