Leonardo da Vinci

   . No trained eye could have mistaken it for anything else. I therefore bought it and made it the very jewel of this superb collection. England, however, always envious and acquisitive, in matters of connoisseurship dense, and now mad with rage to think that I alone had sufficient culture to discern the true and beautiful, at once set up the cry that the bust was the work not of

    Leonardo

   in the fifteenth century, but of an Englishman named

    Lucas

   in the nineteenth. They stopped at nothing in defence of this claim. The English sculptor's son was even produced to remember his father at work on it; while it was affirmed that a piece of his father's waistcoat had been used as an internal support for the bust. The campaign of calumny and mis-information, in short, was as thorough as if

    Wolff's

   Bureau—I mean it was very thorough.'

   "'And what happened?' I asked.

   "'We had no doubt ourselves,' said my companion. 'Had Mr.

    Tussaud

   himself sworn that he was the modeller only yesterday we should have had no doubt, so indelibly, to the competent German eye, was the genius of

    Leonardo

   stamped upon it. But we permitted the bust to be opened from the back, and true enough a piece of modern cloth was found within. That, however, as I say, could not affect the authenticity of the work, for it might easily have been sent to

    Lucas

   for renovation, and it is well known that a renovator often stuffs something inside the shell of these busts to keep it from falling in while he is at work.'

   "'Still it was, perhaps, awkward for you?' I asked.

   "'In the contemptible English art circles some cry of triumph was raised,' he replied, 'but no one in Germany was shaken. Moreover, they knew—what I knew—that England raised these doubts merely to cover her own original stupidity and ignorance. She was now convinced that it was by

    Leonardo

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