Note 231 — 1100. A SCENE IN A PLAY. (continued 2)

This picture and Van Dyck's "Charles the First" (1172) were bought in 1884 from the Duke of Marlborough for £87,500. Sir F. Burton, the Director of the National Gallery, had valued them at £115,500 and £31,500 severally. I remember once hearing Mr. Gladstone refer to this matter. His economic conscience seemed to give him some qualms on the score of the unprecedented price. But he took comfort in the fact that, large as was the price actually paid, the price asked by the owner, as also the valuation of the Director, was very much larger. "At any rate," he said with a smile, "I saved the taxpayers £45,000 on this Raphael, by not listening to the advice of the Director of the Gallery." The purchase had been pressed upon the Government by all sorts and conditions of men. The Royal Academy memorialised Mr. Gladstone, and pleaded especially for the Raphael—"a work produced in that happy period in which the reverent purity and the serene grace of the master's earliest work are already mellowing into the fuller dignity of his middle style." The Trustees of the National Gallery declared that the purchase would at once raise the Collection to a rank second to none, and superior to most, of the great Continental Galleries; whilst a memorial from members of Parliament of all parties, after referring to the Raphael as the finest in point of colouring that ever came from his hand, assured Mr. Gladstone that "their constituents and the whole nation will approve and applaud" a departure from "the hard line of severe economy." It appears from The Life and Correspondence of Mr. Childers (ii. 163), who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, that the purchase was first suggested by Queen Victoria.