might have happened to the Sistine Madonna if it had not been put under
glass,--these being the two most popular paintings in Europe. His fund of
anecdotes was inexhaustible.

Earlier in life he was occasionally given to practical jokes. A woman who
kept a thread and needle store in Boston was supposed to have committed
murder, and was tried for it but acquitted. One day, as Appleton was
going by her place of business with a friend he said: "Come in here with
me; I want to see how that woman looks." Then surveying the premises, as
if he wished to find something to purchase, he asked her if she had any
"galluses" for sale,--gallus being a shop-boy's term at the time for
suspenders.

When the Art Museum in Boston was first built its odd appearance
attracted very general attention, and some one asked Tom Appleton what he
thought of it. "Well," he said, "I have heard that architecture is a kind
of frozen music, and if so I should call the Art Museum frozen 'Yankee
Doodle.'"

Thomas G. Appleton was no dilettante; his interest in the subject was
serious and abiding. He did not wear his art as he did his gloves, nor
did he turn it into an intellectual abstraction. There was nothing he
disliked more than the kind of pretension which tries to make a knowledge
of art a vehicle for self-importance. "Who," he said, "ought not to feel
humble before a painting of Titian's or Correggio's? It is only when we
feel so that we can appreciate a great work of art." He believed that an
important moral lesson could be inculcated by a picture as well as by a
poem,--even by a realistic Dutch painting. "Women worship the Venus of
Milo now," he said, "just as they did in ancient Greece, and it is good
for them, too." He respected William Morris Hunt as the best American