complains, puts him out. Yet he can laugh at artists who "paint ladies with iron lapdogs;" and he describes the great masters of old in words or lines full of truth, and glancing from a pen or tongue of fire. I conceive any person would be more struck with Mr. Fuseli at first sight, but would wish to visit Mr. Northcote oftener. There is a bold and startling outline in his style of talking, but not the delicate finishing or bland tone that there is in that of the latter. Whatever there is harsh or repulsive about him is, however, in a great degree carried off by his animated foreign accent and broken English, which give character where there is none, and soften its asperities where it is too abrupt and violent.

Compared to either of these artists, West (the late President of the Royal Academy) was a thoroughly mechanical and commonplace person—a man "of no mark or likelihood." He, too, was small, thin, but with regular, well-formed features, and a precise, sedate, self-satisfied air. This in part arose from the conviction in his own mind that he was the greatest painter (and consequently the greatest man) in the world: kings and nobles were common everyday folks, but there was but one West in the many-peopled globe. If there was any one individual with whom he was inclined to share the palm of undivided superiority, it was with Buonaparte. When Mr. West had painted a picture, he thought it was perfect. He had no idea of anything in the art but rules, and these he exactly conformed to; so that, according to his theory, what he did was quite right. He conceived of painting as a mechanical or scientific process, and had no more doubt of a face or a group in one of his high ideal compositions being what it ought to be, than a carpenter has that he has drawn a line straight with a ruler and a piece of chalk, or than a mathematician has that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right ones.

When Mr. West walked through his gallery, the result

of fifty years' labour, he saw nothing, either on the right or the left, to be added or taken away. The account he gave of his own pictures, which might seem like ostentation or rhodomontade, had & sincere and infantine simplicity in it. When some one spoke of his "St. Paul shaking off the serpent from his arm" (at Greenwich Hospital, I believe), he said, "A little burst of genius, sir!" West was one of those happy mortals who had not an idea of anything beyond himself or his own actual powers and knowledge. I once heard him say in a public room, that he thought he had quite as good an idea of Athens from reading the Travelling Catalogues of the place, as if he lived there for years. I believe this was strictly true, and that he would have come away with the same slender, literal, unenriched idea of it as he went. Looking at a picture of Rubens, which he had in his possession, he said with great indifference, "What a pity that this man wanted expression!" This natural self-complacency might be strengthened by collateral circumstances of birth and religion. West, as a native of America, might be supposed to own no superior in the commonwealth of art as a Quaker, he smiled with sectarian self-sufficiency at the objections that were made to his theory or practice in painting. He lived long in the firm persuasion of being one of the elect among the sons of Fame, and went to his final rest in the arms of Immortality! Happy error! Enviable old man!

Flaxman is another living and eminent artist, who is distinguished by success in his profession and by a prolonged and active old age. He is diminutive in person, like the others. I know little of him, but that he is an elegant sculptor, and a profound mystic. This last is a character common to many other artists in our daysLoutherbourg, Cosway, Blake, Sharp, Varley, &c.—who seem to relieve the literalness of their prof ssional studies by voluntary excursions into the regions of the preter

K

natural, pass their time between sleeping and waking, and whose ideas are like a stormy night, with the clouds driven rapidly across, and the blue sky and stars gleaming between!

Cosway is the last of these I shall mention. At that name I pause, and must be excused if I consecrate to him a petit souvenir in my best manner; for he was Fancy's child. What a fairy palace was his of specimens of art, antiquarianism, and virtù, jumbled all together in the richest disorder, dusty, shadowy, obscure, with much left to the imagination (how different from the finical, polished, petty, modernised air of some Collections we have seen!), and with copies of the old masters, cracked and damaged, which he touched and retouched with his own hand, and yet swore they were the genuine, the pure originals. All other collectors are fools to him: they go about with painful anxiety to find out the realities:-he said he had them-and in a moment made them of the breath of his nostrils and of the fumes of a lively imagination. His was the crucifix that Abelard prayed to a lock of Eloise's hair-the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckingham-the first finished sketch of the Jocunda-Titian's large colossal profile of Peter Aretine— a mummy of an Egyptian king--a feather of a phoenix-a piece of Noah's Ark. Were the articles authentic? What matter?-his faith in them was true. He was gifted with a second-sight in such matters: he believed whatever was incredible. Fancy bore sway in him; and so vivid were his impressions, that they included the substances of things in them. The agreeable and the true with him were one. He believed in Swedenborgianism --he believed in animal magnetism--he had conversed with more than one person of the Trinity—he could talk with his lady at Mantua through some fine vehicle of sense, as we speak to a servant downstairs through a conduit-pipe. Richard Cosway was not the man to flinch

from an ideal proposition. Once, at an Academy dinner, when some question was made whether the story of Lambert's Leap was true, he started up, and said it was; for he was the person that performed it :-he once assured me that the kneepan of King James I. in the ceiling at Whitehall was nine feet across (he had measured it in concert with Mr. Cipriani, who was repairing the figures) -he could read in the Book of the Revelations without spectacles, and foretold the return of Buonaparte from Elba-and from St. Helena! His wife, the most ladylike of Englishwomen, being asked in Paris what sort of a man her husband was, made answer— "Toujours riant, toujours gai." This was his character. He must have been of French extraction. His soul appeared to possess the life of a bird; and such was the jauntiness of his air and manner, that to see him sit to have his half-boots laced on, you would fancy (by the help of a figure) that, instead of a little withered elderly gentleman, it was Venus attired by the Graces. His miniatures and whole-length drawings were not merely fashionable they were fashion itself. His imitations of Michael Angelo were not the thing. When more than ninety, he retired from his profession, and used to hold up the palsied hand that had painted lords and ladies for upwards of sixty years, and smiled, with unabated good-humour, at the vanity of human wishes. Take him with all his faults and follies, we scarce "shall look upon his like again !" Why should such upon them and us!

and their persons

persons ever die? It seems hard Care fixes no sting in their hearts, 66 present no mark to the foeman."

Death in them seizes upon living shadows. They scarce consume vital air: their gross functions are

end-they live but to paint, to talk or think.

long at an

Is it that the vice of age, the miser's fault, gnaws them? Many of

1 The Author was introduced to Cosway at Paris in 1802. See Memoirs, i., 92.-ED.

them are not afraid of death, but of coming to want; and having begun in poverty, are haunted with the idea that they shall end in it, and so die-to save charges. Otherwise, they might linger on for ever, and "defy augury!"

On Envy. (A Dialogue.)1

Hazlitt. I had a theory about Envy at one time, which I have partly given up of late-which was, that there was no such feeling, or that what is usually considered as envy or dislike of real merit is, more properly speaking, jealousy of false pretensions to it. I used to illustrate the argument by saying, that this was the reason we were not envious of the dead, because their merit was established beyond the reach of cavil or contradiction; whereas we are jealous and uneasy at sudden and upstart popularity, which wants the seal of time to confirm it, and which after all may turn out to be false and hollow. There is no danger that the testimony of ages should be reversed, and we add our suffrages to it with confidence, and even with enthusiasm. But we doubt reasonably enough, whether that which was applauded yesterday may not be condemned to-morrow; and are afraid of setting our names to a fraudulent claim to distinction. However satisfied we may be in our own minds, we are not sufficiently borne out by general opinion and sympathy to prevent certain misgivings and scruples on the subject. No one thinks, for instance, of denying the merit of Teniers in his particular style of art, and no one consequently thinks of envying him. The merit of Wilkie, on the contrary, was at first strongly contested, and there were other painters set up

This appears to be elaborated out of a conversation between the Author and Northcote, printed among the other Conversations in 1830.-ED.