alms in the public streets; and the bones of each filled a pauper's
grave.

Ruskin unearthed Botticelli (Just as he discovered Turner), and gave
him to the Preraphaelites, who fell down and worshiped him. Whether
we would have had Burne-Jones without Botticelli is a grave
question, and anyway it would have been another Burne-Jones. There
would have been no processions of tall, lissome, melancholy beauties
wending their way to nowhere, were it not for the "Spring." Ruskin
held up the picture, and the Preraphaelites got them to their
easels. At once all original "Botticellis" were gotten out,
"restored" and reframed. The prices doubled, trebled, quadrupled, as
the brokers scoured Europe. By the year Eighteen Hundred Eighty-six
every "Botticelli" had found a home in some public institution or
gallery, and no lure of gold could bring one forth.

At Yale University there is a modest collection of good pictures.
Among them is a "Botticelli": not a great picture like the "Crowned
Madonna" of the Uffizi, or "The Nativity" of the National Gallery,
but still a picture painted by Sandro Botticelli, beyond a doubt.
Recently, J. Pierpont Morgan, alumnus of Harvard, conceived the idea
that the "Botticelli" at Yale would look quite as well and be safer
if it were hung on the walls of the new granite fireproof Art-
Gallery at Cambridge. Accordingly, he dispatched an agent to New
Haven to buy the "Botticelli." The agent offered fifty thousand
dollars, seventy-five, one hundred--no. Then he proposed to build
Yale a new art-gallery and stock it with Pan-American pictures, all
complete, in exchange for that little, insignificant and faded
"Botticelli.". But no trade was consummated, and on the walls of
Yale the picture still hangs. Each night a cot is carried in and