The Diplomatic and Official Papers of Daniel Webster, While Secretary of State (1848)

These exhibitions give a great impression of the standing art-wealth of Great Britain, and of the fact that, whether or no the English people have painted, the rest of the world has painted for them. They have needed pictures; it is ungracious to look too narrowly at the grounds of the need. Formerly it was supplied almost exclusively by the lordly operation of purchase; now it is gratified by the simpler process of paying a shilling to an extremely civil person in a front shop and passing into certain maroon-draped penetralia, where the London daylight is most artfully economized, and where a still more civil person supplies you with a neat literary explanation of the pictures, majestically printed on cardboard, and almost as clever as an article in a magazine.