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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from From London to Land's End by Daniel Defoe: LOUIS D'ORS for these pictures; but this, I say, is but a report.
The king brought a great many other fine pieces to England, and
with them the love of fine paintings so universally spread itself
among the nobility and persons of figure all over the kingdom that
it is incredible what collections have been made by English
gentlemen since that time, and how all Europe has been rummaged, as
we may say, for pictures to bring over hither, where for twenty
years they yielded the purchasers, such as collected them for sale,
immense profit. But the rates are abated since that, and we begin
to be glutted with the copies and frauds of the Dutch and Flemish
painters who have imposed grossly upon us. But to return to the
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