Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/396

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376
OUR PHILADELPHIA

me a volume of Hogarth's engravings I remember as exceptional. But I have an idea that had I possessed greater powers of appreciation then, I should have a keener memory now of other houses full of interesting pictures and prints and illustrated books, which I did not see simply because my eyes had not been trained to see them.

Certainly, there were Philadelphia collections of these things then, as there always have been—only they were not heard of and talked about as they are now, or, if they were, it was to dismiss their collecting as an amiable fad. Mr. John S. Phillips had got together the engravings which the Pennsylvania Academy is to-day happy to possess. People who were interested did not have to be told that Mr. Claghorn's collection was perhaps the finest in the country; J. was one of the wise minority, and often on Sundays took advantage of Mr. Claghorn's generosity in letting anybody with the intelligence to realize the privilege come to look at his prints and study them; but I, who had not learned to be interested, knew nothing of the collection until I knew J. Gebbie and Barrie's store flourished in Walnut Street as it hardly could had there not been people in Philadelphia, as Gebbie once wrote to Frederick Keppel, who collected "these smoky, poky old prints." Gebbie and Barrie have gone, but Barrie remains, a publisher of art books, and there are other dealers no less important and perhaps more enterprising, who prosper, as one of them has recently assured me they could not, if they depended for their chief support upon Phila-