Living in Paris a quiet and rather solitary life—in habits more a Frenchman than an Englishman; in tastes an artist and a connoisseur; in purse and opportunity unlimited by any niggard need of self-control—the fourth Marquis of Hertford busied himself in gathering together from the treasure-houses of Europe innumerable precious specimens of the painter’s, the goldsmith’s, and the cabinetmaker’s art. Year after year, with tranquil perseverance, he heaped up on every side of him all the beautiful objects on which he could lay hands—pictures, miniatures, furniture, enamels, china and plate, bronzes, and coats of armour—until his storehouses were full to overflowing of treasures which, except for the pleasure of procuring them, he could hardly ever have enjoyed. In this congenial task he was assisted by a young Englishman, the secret of whose connection with the Hertford family, if any such there was, the public has never penetrated yet. To this young Englishman, who was well known and liked in Parisian society in the tawdry splendour of the Second Empire, and whose active generosity {22} won him wide esteem in that desolated capital amid the terrible events of the winter of 1870–71, Lord Hertford bequeathed the wonderful possessions which he had accumulated in a lifetime of discriminating labour. When the Franco-German War and the Commune were over, Richard Wallace brought his spoils safely home, and exhibited them for a time at the Bethnal Green Museum while he built the great galleries to hold them in Manchester Square. But even here they were not destined to bring much happiness to their possessor. After a short time Sir Richard Wallace was left heirless—like Lord Hertford—by a cruel stroke of fate; and now, by his widow’s gift, the splendid inheritance, which has passed so quickly from the keeping of the hands that laid it up, goes to enrich a public which will not be ungrateful for the donor’s rare munificence, or unmindful of the sad and curious story it recalls.[9] [9] A footnote on p. 229, vol. iv. of G. E. C.’s _Complete Peerage_ says: “[The fourth Marquis] is said never to have been in England. He left his Irish estates (worth £50,000 a year) and most of his personalty (which included the well-known Hertford collection of pictures) to Sir Richard Wallace, Bart. (so _cr._ 1866), who is supposed to have been an illegit. son, either of himself (when aged 18), or of his father, or even (not improbably) of his mother; which Richard (_b._ in London, 26th July 1818) _d._ s.p. at Paris, 20th July 1890, in his 72nd year, and was _bur._ in the family vault at Père-la-Chaise. Sir Richard’s ‘art treasures’ (derived as above stated) were valued at his death in 1890 at above two millions.”