After a careful study of all the Florentine galleries in the winter of 1892-93, I failed to find this copy of the Cromwell mask or any record of its ever having existed there, although the Pitti Palace contains an original portrait of Cromwell from life by Sir Peter Lely, which was presented by the Protector to this same Grand Duke Ferdinand II. The mask of Henry IV., that darling king whose praises still the Frenchmen sing, has also a curious history. During the French Revolution, as is well known, the tombs of the Bourbons and the Valois at St. Denis were desecrated by the citizens of the republic. And when they began to “empty the rat-hole under the high altar,” to use the words of one of their own leaders, the first coffin they came upon was that of Henry of Navarre. The body was discovered to have been carefully embalmed, and it was enveloped in a series of narrow bands of linen, steeped in some chemical preparation. The face was so well preserved that even the fan-shaped beard seemed as if it had been but recently dressed. The upper part of the brain had been removed, and was replaced by a sponge filled with aromatic essences. Enormous crowds came from Paris to look upon what was left of the monarch who once wished that all his subjects might have capon for their Sunday dinners; and undoubtedly some one of them made this cast of his face. It is still a common object in the plaster shops of Paris; and, painted a dark green to match the lintel of his door, it serves to-day as a sign and a symbol for a dealer in plaster images who does business in one of the side streets near upper Broadway, New York. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: HENRY IV. OF FRANCE] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ M. Germain Bapst, writing in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, October, 1891, described a bust of Henry in wax which is preserved at Chantilly; and he proved it to be the work of G. Dupré, who, according to Malherbe, a contemporary historian, went to the Louvre the day after the king’s death to make the wax effigy for his funeral, and took with him the modeller, who made a cast from the king’s features. Concerning this cast itself the writer was silent; but he stated, although without giving his authority, that the plaster cast here reproduced dates back only to the time of the exhumation.