Note 248 — 1100. A SCENE IN A PLAY. (continued 3)

"Congratulate me (he wrote to his old friend and colleague, Sir H. A. Layard) on a real trouvaille. The picture I bought at G. Bentinck's sale has come out splendidly, and is in first-rate condition. Burton is greatly struck with it. It is a wonderful bit of luck to have picked up so fine a picture from among so many of the cognoscenti." No wonder that Sir William Gregory, who bought his pictures so cheap, was aghast at the large and even fancy price which the nation sometimes has to pay. "The cost of them," he writes of the Longford pictures (Nos. 1314-1316) "makes me blush when I think of it."