Quintin Matsys; the Portrait of an Artist, by Hans Memling, or, as some say, Dierick Stuerbout, afterwards in Mr. Roger's collection; one or two undoubted small pieces from the hand of Hans Memling, some in the school of Roger Vander Weyden, and one of the dozen (or fewer) certain examples of Martin Schön known to exist.
The collection was visited by Passavant, the biographer of Raphael, during his visit to England in 183 1, and the Flemish and German portion of it is described at length in his Tour of a German Artist. It is characteristic of our National Gallery management, that not one of these often invaluable examples of rare masters was secured for the nation (it was the régime of Seguier, of liquorice-brown varnish fame), when the opportunity arose. For, in a subsequent year,—1836,— a terrible reverse in trade shattered the fabric of the munificent merchant's prosperity, and involved the dispersion of this interesting collection.
Mrs. Aders, a daughter of Raphael Smith, the engraver and painter, was herself an amateur artist, sufficiently mistress of painting to execute clever copies after the old masters, and original pictures which extorted the praise of Blake—always candid to amateur merit. She was a beautiful and accomphshed lady, of much conversational power, able to hold her own with the gifted men who were in the habit of frequenting her house. It is to her Coleridge's poem of The Two Founts was addressed.
After the ruin of her husband's fortunes she withdrew from society, dying only a few years since. She remembered Blake with especial interest, and to the last delighted to talk of him.
At Mr. Aders' house the German painter, Gotzenberger, met Blake. On his return to Germany he declared: 'I saw in England many men of talent, but only three men of genius—Coleridge, Flaxman, and Blake; and of these Blake was the greatest.' There, too, a gentleman first saw Blake, whom, so long ago as 1809, we beheld a solitary visitor to the
