The painted _portraits_ of the more distinguished of these fathers of our trade would deserve a special study. Sir John Houblon’s may be seen at the Bank of England; Benjamin Bathurst’s is assuredly piously preserved by his ennobled family; Sir John Tulse, who has left his name perpetuated on the picturesque hill near the Crystal Palace, must have possessed good taste enough to be a portrait-painter’s patron; and the letter in the Spectator asserting our superior appreciation of that branch of art is well justified in the numerous portraits scattered all over the land. Our commerce is indeed exceedingly rich in materials of historical portraiture, and in its products. Without ostentatiously boasting of a superiority which is not to be pretended over the statesmen who grace so many halls, our merchants, from the pencils of Holbein and Antonio More down to the latest dates, may challenge comparison with them. The City and its halls are full of them; and Sir Thomas Gresham’s design of an university in London could not be better revived and realized than by annexing a fine gallery of merchants’ portraits to its other branches of instruction. It is a good suggestion, that the profit got by the Treasury from the sale of his estate in Broad Street to a Banking Company, should be pursued to its legitimate issue,--the establishment of that university. The topic of Gresham’s University has some elucidation from the list of 1677. Comparatively few merchants then resided in Broad Street, or in Bishopsgate Street. Rents were therefore low in that quarter. In 1760, when the Gresham property was sold, under an Act of Parliament, for the Excise Office, its income was less than 450_l._ a-year; and the government made it up to 500_l._ The sale, however, to the Gresham Chambers’ Company, a few years since, netted a very large sum to the Treasury. That surplus is believed to revert to the trusts of Sir T. Gresham’s will, since the Acts which have alienated the estate first from the Charity, and then from the Crown, are mere parliamentary titles--quite secure to the occupiers of the land, but not destructive of the rights of the objects of a founder. The matter is indeed under serious scrutiny before the Charity Commission; and it has special claims to the fair consideration of Her Majesty’s prime minister. The _John Temple_ of this list was probably of Lord Palmerston’s lineage. The Palmers of the list, too, doubtless belonged to the family which almost monopolises the Mercers’ Company--Gresham’s trustees; and so Sir Roundell Palmer, the Solicitor-General, must not desert his duty. Nor will he have forgotten his own labour of love in Gresham’s lecture-room, when he helped his relative, Professor Palmer, to do justice to his charge.