2o6 RECORDS OF OLD TIMES 



trast to Altona some years before. One of the 

 great features of the exhibition, of course, was the 

 gallery set apart for paintings and statuary, and was 

 naturally intended for their future reception, and to 

 be worthy of the priceless treasures painted by the 

 most distinguished painters of the fourteenth, 

 fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Many of the 

 finest pictures from the Hague, from Haarlem, and 

 other places had been removed and brought into one 

 centre, making a magnificent collection of the finest 

 examples of the painters of the Low Countries. The 

 famous ' Young Bull ' of Paul Potter is the 

 portrait of an animal I should scorn to see in 

 any decent herd in England, but I am bound to 

 agree with those connoisseurs who declare the 

 picture to be the perfection of a truly poetic compo- 

 sition. However, the bull, the animal himself, is 

 such a wretch that I would not have allowed him 

 to look over a hedge into the field where my short- 

 horns were grazing. It is possible that Paul Potter 

 considered him a fairly good specimen of the cattle 

 at the time, as they existed in Holland. It is 

 perhaps probable that the English cattle at that 

 period might have been of the same class. On that 

 reasonable assumption, we may conclude that our 

 cattle have made immense progress since then in 

 shape, colour, and quality. The great attention 

 paid by us for nearly a century in registering our 

 stock in the Shorthorn Herd-book, as also in 

 the Herd-books of other distinct breeds, has 

 tended to create a wonderful improvement in our 

 breeds. Yet, with all our care, remarkable Instances 



