They can never look like us! They imitate even
our marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can
they chassent de race."
"How should they?" said a bronze statuette of Vischer's. "They
daub themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to
get rusted; but green and rust are not patina; only the ages can
give that!"
"And MY imitations are all in primary colors, staring colors, hot
as the colors of a hostelry's signboard!" said the Lady of
Meissen, with a shiver.
"Well, there is a gres de Flandre over there, who pretends to be a
Hans Kraut, as I am," said the jug with the silver hat, pointing
with his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a corner.
"He has copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to copy us.
Almost he might be mistaken for me. But yet what a difference
there is! How crude are his blues! how evidently done over the
glaze are his black letters! He has tried to give himself my very
twist; but what a lamentable exaggeration of that playful
deviation in my lines which in his becomes actual deformity!"
"And look at that," said the gilt Cordovan leather, with a
contemptuous glance at a broad piece of gilded leather spread out
on a table. "They will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and give
him my name; but look! _I_ am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin
as a film and laid on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de
las Gorgias, worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the blessed
reign of Ferdinand the Most Christian.
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