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roughly mechanical and common-place 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 every-day folks-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 a 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 had 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 with. 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 selfsufficiency 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 professional studies by voluntary excursions into the regions of the preternatural, 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 themand 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 Eloisa'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-the mummy of Oshireth-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 down-stairs 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 knee-pan 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

other's company, because they are always talking of themselves. This seems to be the bond of connexion (a delicate one it is!) between the painter and the sitter-they are always thinking and talking of the same thing-the picture, in which their self-love finds an equal counterpart. There is always something to be done or to be altered, that touches that sensitive chord-this feature was not exactly hit off, something is wanted to the nose or to the eyebrows, it may perhaps be as well to leave out this mark or that blemish; if it were possible to recal an expression that was remarked a short time before, it would be an indescribable advantage to the picture—a squint or a pimple on the face handsomely avoided may be a link of attachment ever after. He is no mean friend who conceals from ourselves, or only gently indicates, our obvious defects to the world. The sitter, by his repeated, minute, fidgetty inquiries about himself may be supposed to take an indirect and laudable method of arriving at self-knowledge; and the artist, in self-defence, is obliged to cultivate a scrupulous tenderness towards the feelings of his sitter, lest he should appear in the character of a spy upon him. I do not conceive there is a stronger call upon the secret gratitude than the having made a favourable likeness of any one; nor a surer ground of jealousy and dislike than the having failed in the attempt. A satire or a lam

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