flounces and brocades! What a cloud of powder and perfumes! What a flow of periwigs! What an exchange of civilities and titles! What a recognition of old friendships, and an introduction of new acquaintance and sitters! It must, I think, be allowed that this is the only mode in which genius can form a legitimate union with wealth and fashion. There is a secret and sufficient tie in interest and vanity. Abstract topics of wit or learning do not furnish a connecting link ; but the painter, the sculptor, come in close contact with the persons of the great. The lady of quality, the courtier, and the artist, meet and shake hands on this common ground: the latter exercises a sort of natural jurisdiction and dictatorial power over the pretensions of the first to external beauty and accomplishment, which produces a mild sense and tone of equality; and the opulent sitter pays the taker of flattering likenesses handsomely for his trouble, which does not lessen the sympathy between them. There is even a satisfaction in paying down a high price for a picture—it seems as if one's head was worth something!-During the first sitting, Sir Joshua did little but chat with the new candidate for the fame of portraiture, try an attitude, or remark an expression. His object was to gain time, by not being in haste to commit himself, until he was master of the subject before him. No one ever dropped in but the friends and

acquaintance of the sitter; it was a rule with Sir Joshua that from the moment the latter entered, he was at home-the room belonged to him-but what secret whisperings would there be among these, what confidential, inaudible communications! It must be a refreshing moment, when the cake and wine had been handed round, and the artist began again. He, as it were, by this act of hospitality assumed a new character, and acquired a double claim to confidence and respect. In the mean time, the sitter would perhaps glance his eye round the room, and see a Titian or a Vandyke hanging in one corner, with a transient feeling of scepticism whether he should make such a picture. How the ladies of quality and fashion must bless themselves from being made to look like Dr Johnson or Goldsmith ! How proud the first of these would be, how happy the last, to fill the same arm-chair where the Bunburys and the Hornecks had sat! How superior the painter would feel to them all! By "happy alchemy of mind," he brought out all their good qualities and reconciled their defects, gave an air of studious ease to his learned friends, or lighted up the face of folly and fashion with intelligence and graceful smiles. Those portraits, however, that were most admired at the time, do not retain their pre-eminence now; the thought remains upon the brow, while the colour has faded from the cheek, or the dress grown obsolete; and

after all, Sir Joshua's best pictures are those of his worst sitters-his Children. They suited best with his unfinished style; and are like the infancy of the art itself, happy, bold, and careless. Sir Joshua formed the circle of his private friends from the élite of his sitters; and Vandyke was, it appears, on the same footing with his. When any of those noble or distinguished persons whom he has immortalised with his pencil were sitting to him, he used to ask them to dinner; and afterwards it was their custom to return to the picture again; so that it is said that many of his finest portraits were done in this manner, ere the colours were yet dry, in the course of a single day. Oh! ephemeral works to last for ever!

who

Vandyke married a daughter of Earl Gower, of whom there is a very beautiful picture. She was the Enone, and he his own Paris. A painter of the name of Astley married a Lady sat to him for her picture. He was a wretched hand, but a fine person of a man and a great coxcomb; and on his strutting up and down before the portrait when it was done with a prodigious air of satisfaction, she observed, If he was so pleased with the copy, he might have the original." This Astley was a person of magnificent habits and a sumptuous taste in living; and is the same of whom the anecdote is recorded, that when some English students walking out near Rome were

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compelled by the heat to strip off their coats, Astley displayed a waistcoat with a huge waterfall streaming down the back of it, which was a piece of one of his own canvases that he had converted to this purpose. Sir Joshua fell in love with one of his fair sitters, a young and beautiful girl, who ran out one day in a great panic and confusion, hid her face in her companion's lap, who was reading in an outer room, and said, "Sir Joshua had made her an offer!" This circumstance perhaps deserves mentioning the more, because it is a general idea that Sir Joshua Reynolds was a confirmed old bachelor. Goldsmith conceived a fruitless attachment to the same person, and addressed some passionate letters to her. Alas! it is the fate of genius to admire and to celebrate beauty, not to enjoy it! It is a fate, perhaps, not without its compensations—

"Had Petrarch gain'd his Laura for a wife,

Would he have written sonnets all his life?"

This distinguished beauty is still living, and handsomer than Sir Joshua's picture of her when a girl; and inveighs against the freedom of Lord Byron's pen with all the charming prudery of the last age.*

* Sir Joshua may be thought to have studied the composition of his female portraits very coolly. There is a picture of his remaining, of a Mrs Symmons, who appears

The relation between the portrait-painter and his amiable sitters is one of established custom : but it is also one of metaphysical nicety, and is a running double entendre. The fixing an inquisitive gaze on beauty, the heightening a momentary grace, the dwelling on the heaven of an eye, the losing one's-self in the dimple of a chin, is a dangerous employment. The painter may chance to slide into the lover-the lover can hardly turn painter. The eye indeed grows critical, the hand is busy but are the senses unmoved? We are employed to transfer living charms to an inanimate surface; but they may sink into the heart by the way, and the nerveless hand be unable to carry its luscious burthen any further. St Preux wonders at the rash mortal who had dared to trace the features of his Julia, and accuses him of insensibility without reason. Perhaps he too had an enthusiasm and pleasures of his own! Mr Burke, in his Sublime and Beautiful, has left a description of what he terms the most beautiful object in nature, the neck of a lovely and innocent female, which is written very much as if he had himself formerly painted this object, and sacrificed to

to have been a delicate beauty, pale, with a very little colour in her cheeks: but then, to set off this want of complexion, she is painted in a snow-white satin dress, there is a white marble pillar near her, a white cloud over her head, and by her side stands one white lily.