shall no longer wonder at his admiration of the highest style of art, or doubt the sincerity of his recorded professions on the subject. The very indirectness of his imitation, in which the whole mystery lies, so sure a proof of his having penetrated the principle of the great master, establishes his claim to originality as well as to consummate judgment and taste.

In 1768 the Royal Academy was instituted, and Mr. Reynolds, holding unquestionably the first rank in his profession, was elected President. On his elevation to this office he received the honour of knighthood. As President he delivered to the students and professors those celebrated discourses which have reflected so much lustre on his name. Their excellence in a theoretical point of view, the elegance of their composition, and on the other hand the apparent contradictions they sometimes contain, have been the theme of frequent observation and discussion. The other writings of Sir Joshua are the Tour to Flanders and Holland,' consisting of notes on the paintings seen by him in those countries in the year 1781; Notes on Du Fresnoy's Poem;' and three papers in the Idler. Among the last, the Essay on Beauty was not so original as is generally supposed, the same theory having been previously promulgated by the Père Buffier in his Cours des Sciences par des principes nouveaux. Paris, 1732.' Among the historical and mythological pictures produced by Sir Joshua, that of the Infant Hercules strangling the Serpents, executed in 1786 for the Empress of Russia, is one of the most considerable: it is pretty closely copied, as to invention and composition, from a description of an antique painting of the same subject in Philostratus. This work, so different from the taste of the Russian painters and connoisseurs, was long treated with neglect; but in consequence of the inquiries of English travellers it has lately been cleaned, and placed in the gallery

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of the Hermitage. It is said to be in a fine state of preservation, and one of the best works of Reynolds. The celebrated picture of Ugolino was produced by an accidental circumstance. The subject was suggested to Sir Joshua by Goldsmith, or, according to others, by Burke, who was struck with the expression of an old emaciated head, among the unfinished studies of the painter, and observed that it corresponded exactly with Dante's description of Count Ugolino. The head was inserted in a larger canvass, and the rest of the composition added. For the Shakspeare Gallery Sir Joshua painted three pictures, the Death of Cardinal Beaufort, the Cauldron Scene in Macbeth, and Puck from Midsummer Night's Dream. The designs for the window of the New College Chapel in Oxford are among the finest of his sacred compositions.

In 1789, finding his eyesight begin to fail, Sir Joshua was compelled to give up the practice of his art. In December, 1790, he pronounced his farewell Address at the Royal Academy, and on that occasion repeated and confirmed, as with his dying voice, his admiration of Michael Angelo. His infirmities confined him much during the short remaining portion of his life, and he died at his house in Leicester Fields, February 23, 1792. He was buried in the crypt of the cathedral of St. Paul, near the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren. The honours of his funeral, as may be imagined, corresponded with his justly-earned fame; and the day after his death a well-known eulogium by Burke appeared in the public papers, so characteristic both of the writer and the great artist to whose memory it was dedicated, that it was called the panegyric of Apelles pronounced by Pericles. It concludes thus:"His talents of every kind, powerful from nature, and not meanly cultivated by letters, his social virtues in all the relations and all the habitudes VOL. III. 2 F

of life, rendered him the centre of a very great and unparalleled variety of agreeable societies, which will be dissipated by his death. He had too much merit not to excite some jealousy, too much innocence to provoke any enmity. The loss of no man of his time can be felt with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow."

[Sketch for the picture of Mr. Eliot and his family,]

For a list of the pictures of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and ample details of his life, the memoir of him by Northcote, who had been his scholar, may be consulted; as well as the accounts prefixed to the various editions of his literary works; and that by Allan Cunningham, in his 'Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.'

JOHN SMEATON will long be remembered as one of the most laborious and most successful civil engineers whom Britain has produced; a class to which our country is deeply indebted for its commercial greatness. He was born at Austhorpe, near Leeds, May 28, 1724. His father was an attorney, and intended to bring his son up to his own profession: but the latter finding, to use his own words, "that the law did not suit the bent of his genius," obtained his parent's consent that he should seek a more congenial employment.

From a very early age he had shown great fondness for mechanical occupations. "His playthings," it is said by one long acquainted with him, "were not the playthings of children, but the tools men work with; and he appeared to have greater entertainment in seeing the men in the neighbourhood work, and asking them questions, than in any thing else." At the age of eighteen he was in the habit of forging iron