In looking through my Méryons, it interests me to find that a good many that are in my Solander-box to-day, belonged, long since, to distinguished Frenchmen who were Méryon’s contemporaries. Thus, a First State of the ‘Saint-Etienne-du-Mont’ was given by Méryon to Bracquemond. My impressions of the ‘Abside’ and the ‘Stryge’ belonged to Aglaüs Bouvenne, who catalogued Bonington, appreciated Méryon, and, in comparatively recent years, wrote some reminiscences of him. A ‘Rue des Toiles, à Bourges’ has on it Méryon’s dedicatory inscription, addressed to Hillemacher the painter. A curious proof of the ‘Partie de la Cité de Paris,’ before the introduction of the towers, which were never really in the actual view, though Méryon chose to see them there, came from the friend of Méryon’s youth, a friend who spoke over his grave--M. de Salicis. Some others of the prints have been Philippe Burty’s. The final trial proof of the ‘Tourelle, dite “de Marat,”’ and one or two other subjects, of which I spare the reader the details, were originally bought of Méryon by M. Wasset, a man the public wots not of, but a collector full of character: the ‘Cousin Pons,’ I dare to call him, of my own earlier day. Let me, in a paragraph devoted to himself alone, recall M. Wasset to my memory. An employé--_secrétaire_, it may be--at the Ministry of War, he lived, when I mounted to his flat, one winter’s night (how many years ago!) in a dark, winding, narrow street, of the Rive Gauche, between the Seine and St. Sulpice--the Rue Jacob. The Cousin Pons, did I say, this gentleman resembled? But Pons was _gourmet_ as well as connoisseur--M. Wasset knew no passion but the collector’s. He dined modestly--by subscription, it was understood--at the Café Procope, in the Quarter--was _abonné_ for repasts taken there, in a haunt once classic, now dull and cheap. His rooms in the Rue Jacob, low and small, were stuffed full with his collections. _Bric-à-brac_ he had, even more than prints. Strange beings who dredged in the River, brought him ancient jewellery, and seventeenth-century watches, that had slept their Rip Van Winkle sleep in the mud of the Seine. I see the venerable collector now, his sombre and crowded rooms lit with a single lamp, and he, passing about, spare, eager, and trembling, with bowed figure; garrulous, excited as with wine, by the mere sight and handling of his accumulated possessions. A few years afterwards--urged thereto by the greatest of Parisian printsellers, Clément, who is now no more--he had a sale, in the Rue Drouot, of his hundreds of prints, of which the Méryons, of course, formed but a small part. Other treasures--then ardently desired--he was to purchase with the proceeds. Is his heart, one wonders, with those treasures now--in the dark Paris street? Or, the hands that trembled so, fifteen years since--have they relaxed their hold, for ever, of the things that were meat and drink, that were wife and child, to him?