rob, ruin, ridicule you, and you cannot find in your heart to say a word against them. The late Mr Sheridan was a man of this kind. He could not make enemies. If any one came to request the repayment of a loan from him, he borrowed more. A cordial shake of his hand was a receipt in full for all demands. He could "coin his smile for drachmas," cancelled bonds with bon-mots, and gave jokes in discharge of a bill. A friend of his said, If I pull off my hat to him in the street, it costs me fifty pounds; and if he speaks to me, it's a hundred!"

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Only one other reflection occurs to me on this subject. I used to think better of the world than I do. I thought its great fault, its original sin, was barbarous ignorance and want, which would be cured by the diffusion of civilization and letters. But I find (or fancy I do) that as selfishness is the vice of unlettered periods and nations, envy is the bane of more refined and intellectual ones. Vanity springs out of the grave of sordid self-interest. Men were formerly ready to cut one another's throats about the gross means of subsistence, and now they are ready to do it about reputation. The worst is, you are no better off if you fail than if you succeed. You are despised if you do not excel others, and hated if you do. Abuse or praise equally weans your friends from you. We cannot bear eminence in our own department or pursuit,

and think it an impertinence in any other. Instead of being delighted with the proofs of excellence and the admiration paid to it, we are mortified with it, thrive only by the defeat of others, and live on the carcase of mangled reputation. By being tried by an ideal standard of vanity and affectation, real objects and common people become odious or insipid. Instead of being raised, all is prostituted, degraded, vile. Everything is reduced to this feverish, importunate, harassing state. I'm heartily sick of it, and I'm sure I have reason if any one has.

ESSAY VIII.

ON THE OLD AGE OF ARTISTS.

MR NOLLEKENS died the other day at the age of eighty, and left 240,000l. behind him, and the name of one of our best English sculptors. There was a great scramble among the legatees, a codicil to a will with large bequests unsigned, and that last triumph of the dead or dying over those who survive hopes raised and defeated without a possibility of retaliation, or the smallest use in complaint. The king was at first said to be left residuary legatee. This would have been a fine instance of romantic and gratuitous homage to Majesty, in a man who all his lifetime could never be made to comprehend the abstract idea of the distinction of ranks or even of persons. He would go up to the Duke of York or Prince of Wales (in spite of warning), taking them familiarly by the button like common acquaintance, ask them how their father did; and express pleasure at hearing he was well, saying, "when he was gone, we should never get such another." He once, when the old king was sitting to him for his bust, fairly stuck a

pair of compasses into his nose to measure the distance from the upper lip to the forehead, as if he had been measuring a block of marble. His late Majesty laughed heartily at this, and was amused to find that there was a person in the world ignorant of that vast interval which separated him from every other man. Nollekens, with all his loyalty, merely liked the individual, and cared nothing about the king (which was one of those mixed modes, as Mr Locke calls them, of which he had no more idea than if he had been one of the cream-coloured horses)-handled him like so much common clay, and had no other notion of the matter, but that it was his business to make the best bust of him he possibly could, and to set about it in the regular way. There was something in this plainness and simplicity that savoured perhaps of the hardness and dryness of his art, and of his own peculiar severity of manner. He conceived that one man's head differed from another's only as it was a better or worse subject for modellingthat a bad bust was not made into a good one by being stuck upon a pedestal, or by any painting or varnishing, and that by whatever name he was called, a man's a man for a' that." A sculptor's ideas must, I should guess, be somewhat rigid and inflexible, like the materials in which he works. Besides, Nollekens's style was comparatively hard and edgy. He had as much truth and character,

but none of the polished graces or transparent softness of Chantrey. He had more of the rough, plain, downright honesty of his art. It seemed to be his character. Mr Northcote was once complimenting him on his acknowledged superiority"Ay, you made the best busts of anybody!" don't know about that," said the other, his eyes (though their orbs were quenched) smiling with a gleam of smothered delight-"I only know I always tried to make them as like as I could!"

"I

I saw this eminent and singular person one morning in Mr Northcote's painting-room. He had then been for some time blind, and had been obliged to lay aside the exercise of his profession; but he still took a pleasure in designing groups, and in giving directions to others for executing them. He and Northcote made a remarkable pair. He sat down on a low stool (from being rather fatigued); rested with both hands on a stick, as if he clung to the solid and tangible; had an habitual twitch in his limbs and motions, as if catching himself in the act of going too far in chiselling a lip or a dimple in a chin; was bolt upright, with features hard and square, but finely cut; a hooked nose, thin lips, an indented forehead; and the defect in his sight completed his resemblance to one of his own masterly busts. He seemed, by time and labour, to "have wrought himself to stone." Northcote stood by his side-all