taste, either in language, conduct, literature, or art. To be vulgar,
was _haut-ton;_ to be refined, to have pursuits that took one from low
party gossip, or heterodox disquisitions upon party, was esteemed odd:
everything original was cramped; everything imaginative was sneered at;
the enthusiasm that is elevated by religion was unphilosophic; the
poetry that is breathed out from the works of genius was not
comprehended.

It was at Houghton, under the roof of that monster palace, that Horace
Walpole indulged that tastes for pictures which he had acquired in
Italy. His chief coadjutor, however, as far as the antiquities of
painting are concerned, was George Vertue, the eminent engraver. Vertue
was a man of modest merit, and was educated merely as an engraver; but,
conscious of talent, studied drawing, which he afterwards applied to
engraving. He was patronised both by the vain Godfrey Kneller and by the
intellectual Lord Somers: yet his works have more fidelity than
elegance, and betray in every line the antiquary rather than the genius.
Vertue was known to be a first-rate authority as to the history of a
painter; he was admitted and welcomed into every great country house in
England; he lived in an atmosphere of vertù; every line a dilettante
collector wrote, every word he uttered, was minuted down by him; he
visited every collection of rarities; he copied every paper he could
find relative to art; registers of wills, and registers of parishes, for
births and deaths were his delight; sales his recreation. He was the
'Old Mortality' of pictures in this country. No wonder that his
compilations were barely contained in forty volumes, which he left in
manuscript. Human nature has singular varieties: here was a man who
expended his very existence in gathering up the works of others, and
died without giving to the world one of his own. But Horace Walpole has
done him justice. After Vertue's death he bought his manuscripts from