Because we all know stories of first-rate works of art having been offered at ridiculously low prices to English galleries and museums and refused by them on the ground that there was no money even for the purchase of what was very good and very cheap, we are surprised and even excited when we hear that a big price (some say as much as L5000) has been paid for a Chinese pottery figure. And those of us who have the fortune to belong to the privileged, and therefore well-behaved, sex hurry off to see what Mr. Hobson describes in the May number of the _Burlington Magazine_ as "a new Chinese masterpiece in the British Museum." Mr. Hobson is a sound archaeologist; consequently it is impossible to read his careful and admirably frank article without surmising that he himself feels some qualms of suspicion about the date, if not the beauty, of his treasure. For us the first question to be asked is: "Is this a fine work of art?" For Mr. Hobson I suppose the first care was to decide whether or no the thing was T'ang. His is the sound, the scientific, the archaeological method; and I feel sure he followed it because it is the archaeological method, and because, had he followed the unscientific, aesthetic method, and considered first the style and artistic worth of this figure, he would have found that in answering our question he had answered his own or made the asking of it superfluous. Had Mr. Hobson been as sensitive as he is sound, we may be sure that he would have seen this so-called T'ang Lohan in America or farther before ever he advised the British Museum to bid a shilling for it. The "new Chinese masterpiece in the British Museum" is a common, pretentious thing, and that, if I must play the archaeologist, is a fair reason for suspecting that it is not the product of a great age--and T'ang art still seems great even after we have seen something of its greater predecessors, Wei, Liang, Sui. This figure, though larger than life-size, is nowise monumental; on the contrary, it is patently a _bibelot agrandi_, reminding one oddly in this respect of Benvenuto Cellini's _Perseus_. It is something that has been conceived on a small scale and carried out on a large. This fact alone, had it been noted, as it must have been by any one who looked at the figure aesthetically, would have suggested that this was a product, not of the T'ang dynasty--an age of monumental sculpture--but of the Ming dynasty--the great age of choice chinoiseries and archaistic experiments.