The terrible story is told of how the late W. H. Vanderbilt came near being cheated out of three hundred thousand dollars by purchasing a painting that was no better than it looked! From that imminent peril he was rescued by death. The painting, it seems, was discovered (where it had not been lost) by a person—nay, a parson—named Nicole, who gave his personal assurance that it was a Rafael. It must have looked a good deal like a Rafael, for although it was for a long time an object of adoration for artist pilgrims from all over Europe, none detected its spurious character. That is clear from the facts that it was later that Mr. Vanderbilt agreed to take it, and that while negotiations were going on Herr Nicole borrowed twelve thousand dollars on it from a banker who has it yet. That could hardly have been true if the pilgrims to its shrine at Lausanne had had their transports moderated by a suspicion that it was not so good as it looked. The reader will kindly repress his hilarity. This is no joke. If a picture can not be better than it looks how does it happen that this one is not so valuable after the exposure as it was before? The notion that a picture _can_ be better or worse than it looks does seem absurd when one stops to think about it. It is not original with me; the late Bill Nye once set the country smiling by solemnly explaining that he had been told that Wagner’s music was better than it sounded. But why did we laugh? We do not laugh when a wealthy “patron of art,” or a paternal government pays an enormous price for a painting _because_ it is pronounced by experts to be a genuine work of a famous “old master.” And we do not laugh—not all of us—when, as in the present instance, the value drops to nearly nothing because the painting proves to be a copy only, or the work of an unknown hand. I am no artist—Heaven forbid!—nor even a connoisseur. If I were I should doubtless understand why a copy that is as beautiful as an original is not so desirable a possession—why it does not give so great pleasure to the eye and the mind and the heart. I should understand why the work of an obscure or unknown artist is not so valuable as the work of a famous artist if it happens to be as good.