My Few Things by Frederick Wedmore — Read

‘My few things! ' In the very title there is conveyed, I hope, some apology for writing of them. If I accept the invitation to do so, it is partly because I must needs know more of what they are -- they are ‘but poor few,' in Shakespeare's phrase -- than any one else can know; partly again because, as I am pleasantly informed, it may be interesting to certain readers to be told, for a change, not what can be amassed -- amassed and perhaps neglected -- by a millionaire who gives several thousand guineas for a modern painting, but what can be got together with merely ‘joyful trouble,' -- with pains, and waiting, and love of the things, and only a little money -- by a simple man of Letters, who happens to have been concerned, to some extent, with other arts than his own; and partly also because, connected with the few things that one has, there are associations, not few but many.

A little blue-grey drawing -- an early drawing of Varley's, which has nothing but the lasting virtues of Economy and Style -- was the first artistic thing that ever belonged to me. It came to me -- like a prized Morland mezzotint, many years later -- from the portfolio of my great-grandfather, who was, as I am told, a friend of Turner's earliest patron, Dr. Munro. But it is prints, not drawings, that, since I began to collect a little, I have chiefly brought together.