(-^^A.(»n.ezdf,,2i:cc^ t^y?^ BRITISH ARTISTS PB,OM HOGARTH TO TURNER; BEING A SERIES OP BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES BY WALTER THORNBURY, AUTHOK OV " ART ASD NATURE," " LIFE IN SPAIN," &C. J M. VV. TURNER. m TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON : HURST AND KLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, SUCCESSORS TO HENRY COLBURN, IS, GEEAT MABLBOEOTJGH STBEET. 1861. 7'he right of Trcmslation is reserved. CONTENTS OF VOL. II. CHAPTER I. A Ship fail of Nobodies ' . ' . . . 1 CHAPTER n. The Prophet in Caxnaby Market — Blake the Visionajy 26 CHAPTER m. The English Caricaturists, and King Cmikshank 45 CHAPTER IV. Men of Promise — ^Procter and Deare . . 70 CHAPTER V. West, the Monarch of Mediocrity, in Nevvman Street 100 CHAPTER VI. Stothard the Graceful . , . .131 iv CONTENTS. CHAPTER vn. Morland in the Sponging House . - l^A CHAPTER vm. David Scott ^ . . . • .173 CHAPTER IX. Epochs of Pamting . . ; • 185 CHAPTER X. Greek Art . . i . • 233 CHAPTER XL Moorish Art ..... 275 CHAPTER xn. Gothic Art .... 296 BRITISH ARTISTS FROM HOGARTH TO TURNER. CHAPTER I. A SHIP rULL OF NOBODIES. A SHIP full of nobodies is what I can just make out with a very fine glass! It is bearing straight down on me, from out of the dark past, and is steering straight for a still darker future. Nearer-;— now the blue haze rises, and the rainbow that sprang across the sea vanishes, and I see the vessel better. It has no name, no figure-head. Its planks seem cofl5n-planks, its crew are ghosts, with shrouded, bound-up faces — "where from, and whither tlound," I roar through VOL. II. ~ B 2 A SHIP PULL OP NOBQDIES. my speaking-trumpet. It ia the mere shadow of a voice that replies — "We are nobodies from Hades — bound to oblivion — cargo, things that the world has for gotten." I stop them, and insist on overhauling the papers, for this is a dangerous station. First in my list from that forgotten crew of the black ship sailing to oblivion, let me call Biagio Rebecca, an artist of Italian extrac tion, who, in George the Third's days, thought, himself somebody, as in cocked-hat and laced cuff he daubed Patience, Virtue, and all their allegorical sisterhood, over the staircases and ceilings of Windsor. With no doubt Infinite belief in himselfj. and infinite contempt for every body else, Rebecca daubed where that impu dent Neapolitan Verrio had daubed before, and he had the impmence to paint himself that gigantic coxcomb. Sir Godfrey Knel- ler, in full-bottomed wig, strutting among the apostles, in an altar-piece. Oh, a very great man for a day or two of this short mortal life was Rebecca, little thinking how in a few years afterwards that grave, dull, A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. 3 old courtier. President West, would laugh at his airs and impudence to old hoary NoUekens, who is modelling at his bust. A few years later, and I, thy biographer, O Biagio, will have scarce a reader who has heard thy name so surely rise the muddy waters of Lethe over mediocre poets and small painters. Thy tangled arabesques, thy vegetable mer maids, have withered and crumbled, since the poor mad king scrambled up and down those Windsor staircases. Thy Faith, Hope, and Cha rities, O bewigged painter, have all grown pale under slanting sun^s and the dry fire heat of many indoor winters. O spoiled door-grainer and marred house-decorator, what ill-genius, strong and wilful, led thee to bedaub palaces, and people a world, suflficiently unhappy, with thy unlnterpretable allegories. The stories told of Rebecca, however, rather make toe like him, for they show a lively, aerial spirit, though a frivolous and conceited one; and, after all, if conceit does not drive a man into Bedlam, or make him yellow and malicious, what great harm is there in conceit? No doubt Rebecca, on lofty scaffold, spent b2 4 A SHIP PULL OJP NOBODIES. many a hopeful hour at. Windsor, sure of immortality, and excelling, as he believedj Guido and Guercino; Romano and Veronese, chattering Italian self-praises, and teasing a not very wise or dignified king with practical jokeSi- Surely, if ever the wicked foUy of the theory of divine right was shown j It; was when such a king as George III. filled the throne. This was the king who let Wilson and Barry: starve, who encouraged West, and disregarded Rey nolds. West, the grave, courtly mediocrity, was supreme then in the palace, for he knew how to humour royal ignorance, and he painted neatly whatever was ordered. But Rebecca, like Verrio, was a reckless joker, and did not care two straws for a king, unless a king proved himself the best or the strongest man. He little' knew how dangerous it was to jest with kings; he little suspected what "kittle cattle" people born in the "lucky accident" of the purple are. On\ one occasion, having been paid in a bag of guineas for his allegories, male and female, red and blue, Rebecca resolved nobly to be ex travagant for once, and take a post-chaise to A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. 5 London from Windsor with Mr. West. The bland and conciliating Quaker court painter of course agrees. The yellow post-chaise comes and whirls the painters towards London, leaving the Round Tower and the great Druid oaks far behind them. On Hounslow Heath, a carriage, with servants in royal scarlet, sweeps past them. A staring, kind, foolish face looks in at them. Hat off, Mr. West, it is the King ! Eebecca, who has a paper star pinned to his coat, tears' it off, as the carriages pass by- one to London, the other to Windsor. A few days after West is bowing and rub bing his delicate courtly hands at Windsor. The King in regimentals, big for a review, strides in, and wishes the painter good morning. West wishes aU Heaven's blessings to fall on the King's head. "But who was the foreign nobleman, West, in your chaise — eh, eh ? " says the inquisitive Monarch; "noble, noble!" " There was no one but Rebecca, your Majesty." " Oh, no, no — it was a person of distinction — foreign noble. I saw his star — diamond star— eh, eh?" 6 • A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. With great reluctance. West hard pressed, confessed his friend's trick, and with proper prudence gave him up to the King's displeasure ; for the King did not like joking — a circum stance partly to be accounted for from the fact that he never understood it. Now, al though the King often spoke to Rebecca as he hung over his allegories, spreading his pa lette, or squeezing his colour-bladders, he always complained to Mr. West gravely about these offensive and low jokes ; and from West he always found sympathy, I wiU be bound. Another trick of this bom jester was to care- fidly etch a pen-and-ink drawing of half-a- crown, then cut it out and lay it on the floor of one of the rooms in Windsor, laughing to exhaustion, when some swollen Bubb Dod- dington, in fuU dress, with sword and bag, forgot his dignity, and ran to pick up the stray money. It was a merry time of It, Rebecca, when you teased kings at Windsor; but day by day thy very grave-stone now settles deeper and deeper in the mud inundation of oblivion. Next from the hold of that shadow vessel let A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. 7 me summons Senor Ceracchi, a man of a darker fate, who all his life, could he have seen it, wore a typical scarlet thread round his neck. He is not a painter but a sculptor, and yet I place lilm among my crew, because his fatejs tragic, and because his name and work are associated with many London nooks that are dear to me. Ceracchi came, a short, meagre man, with a bluish beard and a piercing black eye, from Melty's studio In Rome to England, with letters to his countryman Carlini, afterwards keeper of the Royal Academy, the man who executed the great colossal masks of river gods for the key-stones of Somerset House, who accomplished a great statue of Ward, the Hogarthian quack, and who was one of the competitors for the Beckford monument in Guildhall. With that Carlini, a great man, too, in his day, Ceracchi lived in Carlisle Street, Soho Square. I seldom pass under that Somerset House gateway without thinking I see Carlini in his dirty greatcoat and short pipe, on working- days; or as he gets into his chair for Academy dinners, in purple silk, and scarlet gold-laced 8 A SHIP pULL pp NOBODIES. waistcoat, looking tip and smjiling at the black faces on the key-stones, which were his and jCeracchi's ^andlwprk. WeU, this (Ceracchi, the little thin man with the keen eyes and blue-bjlaok beard, got on well, |being clever and enthusiastic. He took a great studio and rooms in Margaret Street, Caven dish Square, (No. 76, I am told by NoUekens Smith, the king of gossips,) where he 'taught that lovely genius, the Honourable Mrs. Darner, his model of whom i^ now in the British Mu seum. Mrs. Darner, wtom Walpole praises so much, and whose fair hands, dexterpjis in round ing marble wij;h gentle and scarce palpable toijch, did work for amateurs not discreditable. Cerapchi devised several fashionable and po pular things, for he executed a bust of Reynolds for ]the figure-casters and for Adelphi Adams, the architect— and shaped a " Sacrifice of Bacchus" for the front of Desenfan's— ]the great picture- dealer's house in Portland Rpad. This reUevo he kneaded up with Uement apd mastic oU. But, spite of sacrificing Bacchus, and model ling Eeynplds, and teaching Honourable Mrs. to do what nature never meant them to, A SHIP PULL ,OP NOBODIES. 9 things stIU went indifferently with our friep4 Ceracchi. The air in Margaret Street grew worse and worse ; the furniture dusty and sordid, as ,only the unpaicj-for furniture of poverty revengefuUy can. With a wrench at last, BarettI, Johnson's friend, in his Guid,e to the Eoyal Academy, talks, of tbe black figured key stones, and ascribes ;them tp " Signor ,Cej:acchi, an Italian sculptor, whp resided some time in Lpndon, whose abilities the architect ,(Sir Wil liam Chambers) wished to help and encourage among us ; but the Uttle employment found In England for sculptors, however exceUent, frus trated his Intentions." ****** Here we Ipse sight of the little, lean, keen-eyed man, with the bUck-blue beard ; but he reappears for a mpment tp our eyes in a street in Paris, amid a great crowd. In 1801. There is a batch going to the guiUotine, and high ampng them rides in the red cart a Uttle gesticulating man, dressed as a Eornan eniperor. That is Ceracphi. Now for LpcatelU — let us relate his stpry : — In 1782, the Earl of Orford bespoke, in a blun dering, purposeless way, after the manner of 10 A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. noble amateurs in these things, roused by dilettanti talk, I may say, intoxicated with frivolous Art chat about Vatican galleries, and such outworn things, he ordered a (colossal?) group of one LocateUi, without prescribing what it was to be, or what would be the price. The subject, the sculptor said, should be, an his lordship were willing, no less than " Theseus offering assistance to Hercules.; " by which I can clearly see there would be a smaU prize fighter offering something to a big prize-fighter. Nevertheless, the lord, whom the gods pre vious to destroying had maddened with a taste, agreed to the subject, about which, pro bably, he knew nothing ; and on went the artist, pinching his clay, kneading it, and baking It, while his hungry men sharpened their files and chisels ready for the marble. Jean Baptiste LocateUi, come out of that dark ship's hold while I teU your story, my poor, obllvionlzed feUow, to my readers. When first fame knew thee thou wast a poor foreigner, fresh from Verona, that wonderful ancient city, which still wears the great Eoman am phitheatre like a marriage ring, from which A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. 1 1 time cannot wrench it. Thou then livedst at No. 9, in the, Haymarket, with Eossi, an Italian friend, whom actually Heaven permitted to beget a Eoyal Academician. Next I saw thee in Berwick Street; then. In 1776, I behold thee emerge from the chrysalis we all come out of, tUl we pass into what Eichter calls "that black seed-pod," the coffin, in a house in Union Street, at the back of Middlesex Hospital, where Angelini, an assistant of Nol- lekens, miserly Nolly, had before lived, but who had to dispose of his marble "Virgin and Child" by lottery — ^unlucky man ! It was here this unlucky and splenetically-violent man, LocateUi, the child of oblivion, had his great dispute with the Earl of Orford. In the midst of all the aforenamed hope and glory to a needy man, who should come in one day, with large eyes and fretful looks of pedantic dis satisfaction, but the Earl ! — the Earl ! "'Fore George! he never wished a colossal group ! — 'fore-gad ! might he be flagellated If he would have such a bUnd monster of a thing that no country-house would hold ! 'Fore-gad ! he would not, as he was Earl of Orford, not 12 A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. for twenty Italian .marblcrchlppers, 'fore-gad! Tom, do me the kindness to call my coach, and, 'fore-gad! let us drive to White's!" ' Hiinc lachrymae — whence much ink shed ; spe^ ciaUy a furious octavo pamphlet of 125 octavo pages, in bad English and very choice ItaUan, that set the chocolate-houses, and VauxhaU ar bours, and drums, and routs, in quite a fret and ferment. Every lady who wielded fan in fashion's whirlpool read and fussed about — Tlie Dissertatioin of a Colossal Group of John Baptist LocateUi. Poverty spoils even a good man : a bad man it deforms — and generaUy it is a stunting, crip pling, blightlhg, cursed thing ; that it did no good to LocateUi, then, we cannot wonder. The libellus, if not a libel, ran over with spleen, gall, and bUe. All this turmoil ended in a committee of fifteen gratuitous gentlemen, who offered to be arbitratdrs. Amongst these were k5ir James Wright, Mr. Locke, Mr. Nelson the anatomist. West the mediocre, Cipriani the peaceful, Fuseli the blustering, and Procter "the 'man of promise." Fuseli was sarcastic' enough upon A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. 1^ it. Mr. PrPcter too was severe upon the poor Veronese ; but theh he was in the flush of his success, and had just won the Society of Arts premium, and had not been told a word yet of his own miserable death in a Maiden Lane garret; and young men are apt to be arrogant, if riot mean and cringing. Some said the Umbs of Theseus were all broken, and others that the joints of Hercules were aU out ; the surgeons pulled them, the artists eyed them, and the sculptors sniffed about them ; but old NoUekens among the outsiders was terrible, for he chuckled and- said : — "Those figures of LocatelU's look like the dry skins of two brickmakers, ¦ stuffed with clotted flocks from an old mattress. I think LocateUi must have studied Goltzius's Hercules, that we used to call ' the potatoe man.' " And all this time LocateUi went about fret^ ting and bragging, quite glad that he had at last got the public by the ear, and declaring that he had been much noticed by the Eng Ush at Verona and Venice ; that Count Firmin, , M. Tilot, and Cardinal Crescenzi (whoever they 14 A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. were^ had employed him; and the brothers Battoni had gone to the enthusiastic length of ordering as many as seventy statues and groups, which I don't believe, though I do beUeve very strongly In the existence of fools. In the opposite camp paced up and down the AchiUes of the opposite faction, the Earl of Orford taking his wig on and off. He com plains of LocateUi's ingratitude. He had pur chased largely from him abroad models from the antique, at one hundred guineas each. Directly LocateUi came to England, he (the Earl) had been the first to particularly notice him; finding him unemployed, he ordered a group, expecting and ready to pay dearer for it than he had for the .models wrought in Italy — he even advanced money running up to 3501. ; but when he goes and finds the group colos sal, which is unusable and bad, which is In tolerable, he refuses to pay the price.' Hino lachrymoB. But, after aU, though rather heedless and wrong-headed, and unbuslness-like — which in business is the worst slif of all — there was some good in the Earl; for though he had the ma- A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. 15 « jority in the committee, he paid LocateUi after aU for the inodel that NoUy gibed at so, and sent it off to the family seat at Houghton, the place Horace Walpole talks so much of, and there — for there is iU-luck over unsuccessful people and things — ^It was destroyed. When the fire scorched Houghton, and all that re mained of it was a poor model, portions of which lingered for some time in the New Eoad studio of Smith, LocateUi's pupU, the Smith who designed the GuildhaU monument to Lord Nelson — and there probably it went to pieces, or to obUvion, which is the same thing. Now, aU we-know more of this son of darkness is, that when the fashionable furore subsided — as such small deluges are apt to do — LocatelU sank into dimmer obscurity and neglect than be fore, though he Is known to have chiseUed a chim ney-piece for one of the Adelphi Adams, which went down to Harewood House, in Yorkshire. He also, when old NoUy was down buying health at an " awful expense " at Harrowgate, helped to carve, with his pupU Eossi, the basso- relievo now blackening outside the ClerkPnweU Sessions House. That was in 1780. 1*6* A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. In 1796, sore and disappointed, hie left Eng land fbr MUan, where Napoleon (pleased, I suppose, at ari Italiari of ^was^-genius leaving England to return to FrenPh riile), patronized him arid grarited hini a pension for life. This no doubt kept him aUve a long time; but hte di^d at last, and once having died, was instantaneously forgotten. Next I caU back Captain Laroon, a con temporary of the great Hogarth's, an amateur draiightsinan, whose rpd chalk and black-lead pencU drawings exist now only in the port folios of the curious. Laroon was the son of a French painter, who. Uved in Bow Street, and who at the treaty of EysWick, where Prior was a diplomatist, sent his clever son to be one of Sir Joseph Williamson's six pages ; having already well educated him at home, and taught him Avritirig, airithnietic, fencing, dancing, painting, and the six-string viol. After a page's view of the celebrated treaty, Laroon went as page to Venice with the Earl of Manchester, the EngUsh ambassador— formirig one of his train of two-and-twenty de pendents. A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. 17 After a year's roystering, gondolaing, dancing, and fating, Laroon returned to plain Bow Street, to practise as a painter ; but quarrelling there with his younger brother, he became an actor and singer at Drury Lane; then again turned painter; and stiU restless, as EngUshmen with foreign blood in their veins are, I think, apt to be, he joined the battalion of Guards under Colonel Gozsuch as a cadet, and accompanied the Duke of Marlborough in his yacht to the twar in Flanders. Laroon, soon after joining, distinguished him self by guarding aU night (unrelieved) the Duke's bedchamber, when there was a rumour that the enemy were about to try and carry him off. The next year, as Ueutenant in the Earl of Orkney's first battalion, Laroon did brave work at Oudenarde, and at the battle of WinnendaU was struck by two spent buUets, one on the forehead and one on the left arm; and at the siege of Ghent, whUe talking in the trenches, was shot in the shoulder by a townsman who had approached concealed by the fog. After a turn at Tournay, this chUd of fire VOL. II. C 18 A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. accompanied General Stanhope to Spain, and became in the next campaign Deputy-Quarter master-General of the English arrriy. At the battle of Saragossa, Laroon went as volunteer in Colonel de Bourgay's regiment of foot, where the enemy were routed with great slaughter, and lost some six thousand men; but at Madrid our adventurer was , surprised and taken prisoner by an unexpected advance of the French and Spanish forces. He was con fined in a town In Biscay, and, after a plea sant gay imprisonment of twenty months, was exchanged and returned to England. In 1715, when the northern rebellion suddenly flamed out. Captain Marcellus Laroon joined a new regiment of dragoons, and rode to Lancaster to join them. Retreating from Preston to Wigan, the Jacobites were invested after some trouble in Preston, and forced to sur render. Three of the ChevaUer St. George's officers were shot, and the rest sent to Lon don. A march to StirUng after the flying cheva lier was Laroon's next adventure ; but the Pre tender, embarking at Montrose, left him free A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. 19 to go and put dovra some Highland clans round Inverness, where ended the veteran's wars with his getting his troop, and, with his usual luck, the regiment breaking up soon after. Hogarth must have often seen the works of this imitator of his, with their spirited and sweeping lines of red chalk, and their liquid flowing pencil curves. Horace Walpole, too, liked this accomplished amateur's work, and possessed a red chalk drawing of his, repre senting wicked Moll King In Covent Garden, and Laroon must have often beheld there, and at Mother Douglas's tavern, the clashing sword brawls and wig-tossing uproars that Hogarth delighted In and often witnessed. Indeed, it is MoU King's booth opposite St. Paul's church that Will has introduced In his moming sketch of Covent Garden; and the very stiff Wel^h baronet that Hogarth Introduced in his " Rake's Progress" (the arrest scene) figures also in one of Laroon's sketches of night revelry. Laroon's works, good or bad, have, however, all sunk into the sea of oblivion, where so much buUion and so much rubbish lies unheeded. Of c2 20 A SHIP FULL OP NOBODIES. all his works, we find only record now of two or three things : — 1. The Strawberry HUl drawing of the inside of MoU King's. 2. The same, with Mr. Aprice in full court dress. 3. A drawing of the members of a Covent Garden club. 4. A gUt folding screen, painted with spirited, humorous figures of a quack doctor, a Merry An drew, and a gaping mob ; and a portrait, in oUs, of Mr. Dacon, of Covent Garden, a gentleman in the Excise^office, who practised wood engraving, and lost his life of the jail fever that in May, 1750, carried off slxty^four persons. Mr. Welch, NoUekens' father-in-law, who suc ceeded the novelist Fielding as police-magis trate, used to say, that of aU the rakes of the time, Laroon, his friend Captain Mon tague, and their page Uttle Cazy — the link boy afterwards transported for stealing — were the most Incorrigible. Boitard, says NoUekens Smith, has introduced Laroon brandishing an artichoke in his rare print '¦-» " Covent Garden Morning Frolic ;" where A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES 21 little Cazy, with his link, is preceding Bet Care- less's sedan, on the top of which lolls Captain Montague, palpably drunk. There is also a print representing Laroon as Captain Macheath, in his moment of hesitation, singing — " How happy could I be with either!" It is not improbable that the two mad gallants, who are froUckIng In Hogarth's "Moming in Covent Garden," were intended for Laroon and Montague returning home from Sir Robert Wal pole's club of six gentlemen that met at Scott's, the marine-painter, in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, where the witty, pretty Mrs. Scott always attended on them. After a rough, noisy, dangerous life — after much drawing of blood and faces — after much fighting and drinking, Captain Marcellus Laroon died quietly at York, in the summer of 1772, aged ninety-three; and from that moment ob livion laid her stifling hand on him, and he was forgotten. Lastly, from the dark, nameless ship, steering fast to oblivion, let me summon Peter Schee- mackers, a great man in his time— a very great man -but now smaU enough, and all but forgotten. 22 A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. He was, a book teUs me, a native of Antwerp, and studied under old Delvaux, just as NoUe kens afterwards studied under him. Fired by a noble impulse, the young sculptor, in 1728, though very poor, determined to walk from Antwerp to Rome, in order to study in Italy, as the Flemings theri thought fit to do. Like Perrier, who had for the same purpose followed a blind beggar to Rome as his guide, the young Fleming tramped his tedious' way — faUing ill, and selling the very shirt from his knapsack for food. But this self-denial and struggle had their reward, as they always must have, even without genius ; for, at Rome, Scheemacker's avidity for Art interested many patrons; and, with a pack age of models made from celebrated antiquesj he came to England, and set up in London -^having, however, first visited Denmark, and worked there as a journeyman. He lived in Westminster, near Henry VII.'s Chapel, and from there removed to Vine Street, Piccadilly. Here, rivalling In the favour of the rich RoubUlIac and Eysbach, the lucky Fleming entered upon the fuU summer of his life, after A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. 23 a rough but hardening winter. He did any thing — busts, vases with bas reliefs, monuments, or garden statues. London still, with silent ingratitude, possesses, with Uttle thankfulness, many of his statues. To wit, the statue of Shakespere in West minster Abbey, from a design by that impos tor, Kent; Dr. Chamberlain's monument in Westminster Abbey, Admiral Pocock's, and Major Lawrence's, Lord Clive's statue in the India House, the bronze Guy in Guy's Hospital, the tasteful, graceful little bronze Edward VI. in the court-yard of St. Thomas's Hospital In the Borough, and Dr.Mead's bust Inthe Temple church. In the country, also, this industrious handi craftsman adorned many country seats with perishable records of perishable riches. As, for instance, the Ferrers' seat at Staunton Harold, in Leicestershire, and Stowe ; of which the .moraUst can now only say with a sigh, " Stetit." There he and Delvaux (Junr.) were em ployed to decorate the gardens, and competed with each other which could best adorn the flower-plots. For- the Temple of Ancient Virtue this ready manufacturer designed life- V 24 A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. like statues of Lycurgus, Socrates, Homer, and Epaminondas. In the front of the pediment of the Temple of Victory and Concord he worked an alto-relievo, representing the four quarters of the world bringing their various products to Britannia. In the Temple of English Worthies he also designed (it is supposed) four teen busts of English worthies. High up among the trees, too, in this world of pretensious sham, he set a statue of Queen CaroUne on a stucco Corinthian column, that was after wards taken down, and put by as lumber, to prevent it falling. For the Temple of Friend ship he executed some busts of noblemen. Indeed, with lavish hand, and the glib, un hesitating readiness of industrious mediocrity, Scheemacker's strewed Pitts, and Chesterfields, and princes and earls, all over the foolish, pompous place. The leaden statue of Shakespere, now over the principal entrance to Drury Lane, was also the work of the same indefatigable hand who gave his designs to be cast by Cheere, the cele brated garden-figure maker of Piccadilly, for whom EoubiUiac had worked. / A SHIP PULL OP NOBODIES. 23 This great mediocrity — this Scheemacker, who wiU be chiefly (if at aU) remembered by his introducing brocoli into England in 1700 — died at Antwerp, where he went to end his days, having latterly become so fat, that when he knelt down in the cathedral to say his prayers he had great difficulty in rising again. And here I dismiss my ship, with its dead crew, and wish my unknown great ones a speedy voyage to the far Lethean sea from which they wUl never — ^never return. 26 CHAPTEE II. THE PROPHET IN OARNABY MARKET — ^BLAKE THE VISIONAKT. We English have many faults, which our old rivals and neighbours the French, " littered under Mercury," have not failed to find out: we are cold-blooded traders — " quotha," we are stubborn, Ul-mannered people — " quotha," we are obstinate, and do not know when we are beaten. Like the Athenians, we are also the ambitious planters of colonies in iU-conquered places. We have many faults, I say; for the sentence is grown like a team of sixteen horses, too long for one man to drive — some which we may cor rect, and some which we cannot ; but of one thing even the Germans, in their sourest kroutish BLAKE THE VISIONARY. 27 humour, cannot accuse us — and that is, of being visionaries. Still we have had some, even be fore the great monarch of dreamers, Swedenborg, came to live at PentonvUle — and our Art- world has had them too. Loutherbourg, the pano- ramist, who lived near Turner, at Twickenham, and was Gainsborough's great friend, was one; so was that airy little fop, Cosway; so was Varley, the primitive water-colourist ; so was Flaxman, who turned his dreams Into marble; last, not least, so was good WiUiam Blake, the hosier's son, the prophet of Carnaby Mar-* ket. Golden Square, a most poetic dreamer, an enthusiast of more than Swedenborgian calibre, and a poet of no mean order; for he anti cipated Wordsworth, rivalled our old drama tists in sustained majesty and dignity, and at times vied with Shelley in nervous fire; yet he lived unknown, and died poor, in Fountain Court, Strand, which I venerate for his sake. Blake was the HeU-Breughel, the Kaulbach, the Dor6 of English art, and it shames us that he should still be unknown, when such men as and lord it in Art, and forsooth get it immortalized by the graver. Carnaby Market, 28 THE PROPHET IN CARNABY MARKET ; the fusty market leading to mean streets and a dingy square, on the dreary side of fashionable Ee- gent Street, a place once a pest-house field for thirty-six plague-struck men, was not a likely place for genius to arise; but then For tune is capricious, and is as often found in the tdberncB as in the regumque turres. God be thanked for it, for the rich have everything in England — lords of land and lords of cotton. They have the picking of the world's best. At the house of the father of my old friend, Leigh, the artist, Blake was a frequent visitor, as was Varly ; it was there he drew his " Demon Flea," one of the wildest fancies ever hatched in man's brain, and worthy of a Eabelais Cruikshanks. Encouraged by his mother, Blake began, as soon as he rolled out of the cradle that had prepared him for the tossings of Ufe's sea, to draw and to write verse. He drew on the waUs, on the counter, on the shop till, on the shop paper, and drew weU, and wrote good verse, that the gods would not have spurned, though they might not have understood. His father, pleased at the instinct which he could not explain, and proud of having originated a genius, determined BLAKE THE VISIONARY. 29 to send him to a great man's studio ; but the great man asked a great sum, and the little man at Carnaby Market at last took WUUam to an engraver in Green Street, Lincoln's-Inn-FIelds, and at fourteen years of age bound him appren tice, just as the poor thread-bare corrector of the press for thfe booksellers in Little Britain had done for Hogarth. Artist at ten, poet at twelve, the sequence shows the mind of the boy — first an artist, then a poet, but stiU always a dreaming, sometimes rather a mad poet, painter, and engraver. A dutiful servant of an engraver, Blake re mained, bending his strange head, crammed with dreams, over polished steel plates and squares of shining copper, busying himself with sharp scoops and needles, under screens — shades of tissue paper, dreaming aU the time of Edward ni.'s chivalry, or of the chimney-sweep's suffer ings — oppressed with drudging London toU, and longing for the gentle sunshine of pure country Ufe. Yet-" certes " the deformed and blinded sun of London never shone on a greater enthusiast. In a quiet room in Green Street he lived Uke a 30 THE PROPHET IN CARNABY MARKET ; hermit, to execute drawings, and iUustrate them with verses for the walls of his mother's bed-room. He boldly to the stupid, selfish, undreaming, wide-awake world, called amusement, idleness — sight-seeing, vanity, money-making — the ruin of all high aspiration. He said, " Were I to love inoney, I should lose aU power of thought — ^lust for gain deadens genius. I might roU in wealth, and ride in a golden chariot, were I to listen to the voice of parsimony. My business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes, expressing god-like sentiments." Here was a dreamer for the PhiUstines to jeer at, put into the publishing miU, get money out of and flout. Days at the graver — evenings at drawing and verse, pure-hearted and hopeful. " So merrily the days of Thalaha went by." And aU this time, when at No. 28, Carnaby Market, the prophet lived, FuseU the rantypole lived at No. 1 ; so with FuseU and Flaxman, Blake studied. At six-and-twenty Blake married Katherine Boutcher, a poor but pretty and honest-hearted girl of his squalid district. The marriage came BLAKE THE VISIONARY. 31 about oddly enough, for Blake was too busy and solitary a man to have much time to fall in love unideaUy. Blake was eloquently lamenting the neglect of some goddess who had jilted him. "I pity you from my heart," said Kate, betraying her friendship. " Do you pity me ? " cried Blake, heartily, awakening to a sense of a love he had never realized. " Then I love you for that." " And I love you ! " cried Kate, with true- hearted frankness, too simple to make the most of the great deed of gift. They married, and were happy — a common end of a fairy tale, but in reality not perhaps so common as might be imagined possible. Father rather grumpy about the unprofitable love-match. Blake leaves father, and goes to Green Street, Leicester Fields, where Woollet, the great engraver of Wilson's pictures, used to Uve, and where he used to fire off a cannon from the leads of his house when he had finished a plate. Here Blake remained tiU his good, honest father died ; and then he returned to Carnaby Market, to start as printseller, with Parker, a feUow- 32 THE PROPHET IN CARNABY MARKET ; apprentice, and a favourite brother.' But men of genius, who often turn mere date leaves into gold, sometimes turn gold back again into dry leaves. With Blake, as tradesman, everything failed. Parker went off in a flash of angry fire ; the poor brother died — the customers left. Parker and the trade foUow the brother; disgusted with trade, and repentant of the temporary sinful wish of desiring to make money, Blake betook himself to Poland Street, where Dr. Burney once Uved. Here he plunged into a sea of dreams ; he engraved for a living, and In the evening wrote songs, imagined music, and drew to iUustrate his own poems, the beautiful and simple songs of " Innocence " and " Experience," which he now pubUshed. A man of genius's first and dearest con verts and beUevers are those of his, own house. Mohammed began by converting his wife, Kadijah. Blake's dear Kate believed in him, and adored and wondered at his fiery-eyed, irrestrainable genius. She cared not whom the fool-world crowned : to her Blake seemed not less great because he Uved in Poland BLAKE THE VISIONARY. 33 Street, Inste'ad of May Fair. She sat by him, admiring his work, and never tiring in her encouragements. She stood at the press to reproduce his engravings. She coloured them with her own hand ; she drew — she also loved art and poetry commingled — and she loved her husband better, because he was also the artist and poet. It has not been observed, but is stUl, I beUeve, true, that the love of a chlldlfess couple is greater than when other ties arise to weaken the primary affection ; this is one of those Divine compensations of which this wonderfully-framed world is so fuU. A solitary life, a perpetual, and even pro fessional, indulgence in dreaming, soon de veloped in Blake the mature visionary. He now began to hear voices and see day-dreams: everyone he drew appeared to him, and he could not, at last, discriminate between what he thought- of and what he saw with the bodily eye. Madder than Hamlet, Blake had forgotten "The mind's-eye, Horatio;" he even saw the devU in his coal-cellar, and his dead brother, he believed, retumed to teU him a secret in engraving. VOL. II. D 34 THE PROPHET IN CARNABY MARKET ; He printed and engraved these songs him self, after this strangely-vouchsafed receipt : he tinted the figures beautifully with strange colours, yellow predominating, and then began sixteen small plates, caUed "The Gates of Paradise." Unfortunately, he became poorer, and, ,^erhaps from want of the purifying in fluence of popularity, more obscure and allegori cal. His " Urizen " (twenty-seven designs), which even his wife could not fuUy understand, were fuU of purgatorial horrors and Dantesque thought, and probably were Intended to represent the effects of the faU, and the efforts of evil to corrupt man. Blake was now (1794) living in Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, and began to be known to , booksellers and printsellers, who prepared to use his talent (after their fashion) as cheaply as they could. They talked to him much of fame, but themselves at the same time ate the pudding. Edwards, a bookseller, employed Blake to illustrate Young's " Night Thoughts," (for much fame, but smaU money,) beautifully and origi naUy. Blake worked, but the productions of BLAKE THE VISIONARY. 35 his pure mind were too much for the impurely proper and the prude, and they gained him little but the increased admiration of Flax man, who introduced him to the quasi-poet, Hayley, who he went, with his wife and sister, to visit, at Felpham, in Sussex. The visionary found the country more spiri tual than London. He discovered there that he had been painting cycles of ages before he was born, and that the archangels' picture-gal leries were fuU of his works. What were riches to such a man? By day he worked to illus trate the " Life of Cowper ; " in the evening he walked by the sounding sea^shore, to dream he saw Dante and MUton, Pindar and Virgil, walk ing with him over the bladdery sea^weed and among the salt shells. He said they were grey yet harmonious shadows of more than average stature. (N.B. Blake was a Uttle man, and thought much of stature.) He saw a Fairy's Funeral. Milton even went so far as to hand him an unpubUshed poem, which, however, was not quite as good as "Paradise Lost." After three years, with that dullest of all human poets, Hayley, Blake returned to Lon- d2 36 THE PROPHET IN CARNABY MARKET ; don, to seventeen years' dreaming in South Molton Street; where he produced his wild rhapsody "Jerusalem," with a modest intima tion that now he, "After three years' slumber on the banks of the ocean, again displayed his Giant Forms to the public." The Giant Forms did not sell ^- perhaps, partly because they were giant forms, partly be cause they were Imprudently offered at twenty- five guineas the set. Illustrations for Blair's " Grave," much praised by Fuseli, were Blake's next productions. Mr. Blake complained that the engraver, Schiavon- netti, was too polished and weak for him, and was inadequate to transfer his thoughts from paper to steel. These illustrations (hard, lU-pald work, tamely engraved, it must be remembered) are very unequal. The " Old Man at Death's Door " has, however, sublimity about it ; and the angel raising the dead is original. Mr. FuseU's influence crops out in this book as injurious to Blake ; for Fuseli led the visionary deeper into the cold, aUegorical world, and further from nature than he might otherwise have gone. BLAKE THE VISIONARY. 37 Here, again, ebi the pure delineation of the human body that God made and said, " It is good," the northern prudes, more prudish than even the southern prudes, professed much horror as they looked and looked, in order to cor- tectly guage the amount of impropriety. About the time that in self-defence Blake (1809) opened an exhibition of his works at his brother's house — the old dreaming plaPe in Carnaby Market^ — Blake had his first and last quarrel with a fellow-artist. He accused Stoth ard of imitating him in his " Canterbury Pil grims," and of stealing his subject. The fact is, Blake seems to have dreamt that Cromek, the engraver, had commissioned him to paint the picture. The exhibition was a failure; it was too spiritual fof a gross, undreaming world. The catalogue that attempted to iUustrate the pro phet's failure was a wUd rhapsody of visiofls, triistaken for reasonings, and formed a sort of creed, showing what Blake wanted to do ra ther than what he had really done. He con demned oil-J)aintings as perishable, and upheld water-colours arid fresco. He contended,, justly, 38 THE PROPHET IN CARNABY MiRKET ; that where 'form Is wrong, colouring can never be right ; and stUl more prophetioaUy of Turner, who proved the fact that clair-obscur, and not local tint, is the real source of good colour. He praised clear, precise outline, and condemned aU shadows that hide form. He swept away at once aU works since the time of Eubens ; and while praising Eaphael and Albert Durer, Mi chael Angelo and Julio Eomano, he retumed an evil verdict against Titian and Correggio, Eubens and Eembrandt. With a true engraver's appreciation of form, he upheld, as essential to aU true Art, " the distinct, sharp, wiry, and bound ing external line : " he called it the line of the Almighty, the line of life and distinction,, without which Art became mere chaos. Fired by this belief, which his fervid and not always well- balanced imagination, believed to be imparted to him by something little short of inspiration, Blake leaped on the tripod, and denounced the demons who were let loose on earth to fiU artists' mind with hopes, fears, and perturba tions, and confound "the sharp, wiry outline" pre-ordained of God. It is they, he said, who turn Art into a machine, who block up a pic- BLAKE THE VISIONARY. 39 ture with brown shadows, who make the artist mistrust his first conception. The Titian demon suggested to him the Indispensable necessity of a model— the outrageous Eubens demon impeded originaUty — the. sensual, effeminate, but crude Correggio demon suggested hopes of imitation. As to the Pitt and Nelson pictures, the ra ther crack-brained genius said, they were drawn from visions seen iir the ancient Asian patriarch ates, and were copied from statues of cherubim 100 feet high. No wonder that that wise humorist, Charles Lamb, who had sent a beautiful little poem, fuU of touching simpHcity, to Montgomery, wrote with great unction about the author Blake to honest Bernard Bartonj narrating how the artist had seen and drawn in visions the old Welsh bards ! " The beautifuUest, the strongest, and the ugUest man left aUve, after the massacre of the Britons by the Eomans." But he concludes : — " Alas ! the man is flown, whither I know not — to Hades or a mad-house — but I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age." 40 THE PROPHET IN CARNABY MARKET ; It was at this time. when at work on Job, with all the patience of the man of Uz, Blake, from nine at night till five in the morning, used to hold his spiritual levees — staring on vacancy with kindling eye, and with his pencil drawing spirit -portraits for artist friends or feUow-enthusiasts. Thus he drew WaUace, the heroic ; and Edward, the bloody ; Lais, the impudent ; and the lovely Corinne. Pindar, as he stood a conqueror at the Olympic games ; the cruel task-master of Egypt, who Moses slew ; a fiend who resembled .^ a contemporary law yer ; Herod, who was exactly like a critical editor of Blake's time ; and, lastly, a demon flea, with a cup in his hand to hold blood, and clad In a scaly serpentine suit of green and gold. Lot, too, honoured him with a sitting; and at last, to crown aU his spiritual visions, he saw, as he went upstairs in the dark, staring fiercely through the iron grat ing of a staircase window, with eyes like Uving coals, and teeth like a hairrow — the real Gothic devU— "aU else," said the unheeded prophet and seer, " are apocryphal." BLAKE THE VISIONARY. 41 AU this time the prophet turned in the money miU, where the world has put all the Sampsons it blinds; lived in one smaU room in South Molton Street, with dear, faithful, loving, believing Kate ; subsisting on eighteen shiUings a-week for both ; inventing, designing, and engraving his twenty-one fine Ulustrations to Job. In these he was sublime, and fiiU of a high imagination, that did not spurn common sense from the threshold of its airy palace. He flew at everything. Hope and the morn ing stars sung together before him in that poor room in South Molton Street. Yet aU this time it went IU with the poor old prophet. He paid his smaU debts, was cheer ful, independent, and had visions, and drew them dally the same as ever ; yet the ghastly face of sta,rvation sometimes looked down South Molton Street, half planning a dreadful visit to No. 17. A kind friend, Mr. Linnell, saved him, however, from this visit, by employing Blake to en grave his own " Inventions of the Book of Job." Encouraged by the mere fact of being able to keep body and soul together, Blake next produced two mysterious volumes of prophecies on America 42 THE PROPHET IN CARNABY MARKET ; and on Europe. There were enormous fishes preying on dead bodies, and a vulture feeding on a floating corpse ; two angels emptying a pailful of spotted plague on England ; a man drowning at sunset; the great sea serpent, an angel and three furies standing coolly (?) in the sun. But his favourite of aU the designs was the " Ancient of Days " — God, in an orb of light, stooping down into chaos to measure out the world. StiU sinking, Blake, in 1823, after seventeen years of poverty that left painful, yet endear- ( ing memories, quittedj'' South Molton Streetf and moved to No. 3, Fountain Court, Strand. Here he continued, older and poorer, yet stiU happy and independent, to draw and engrave, to wash with glue-water, and to tint his "Je rusalem" and his "Ancient of Days," for the former of which he in vain attempted to get twenty-five guineas. He had written volumes of verse, and had designed one hundred and two sublime designs to Ulustrate Dante, his dear wife all this time watching, with intense and touching belief, his moments of inspiration. But the most striking of all Blake's spiri- BLAKE THE VISIONARY. 43 tual visitors was about to visit him- I mean The Angel op Death. Blake was seventy-one, and hard work and want are not the most advantageous assist ants to longevity. His strength failed, the flame of life was fluttering round the socket. Three days before his death, the brave, good old man sat bolstered up in bed, tinting with heavenly colours his "Ancient of Days." At last he laid it down, and said to his watchful wife, "There, that will do; I cannot mend it." The wife, thinking he meant never to touch brush again, burst into tears. "Stay, Kate," he cried, "keep just as you are. I wiU draw your portrait; you have been always an angel to me." Though bed-ridden, the good old man after this lay chaunting im provised songs from improvised tunes, lamenting he could not commit the inspirations to paper. "Kate," he moaned, "I am changing. I always rose and wrote down my thoughts, whether it rained or snowed, blew or shone, and when I rose, you rose too, and sat be side me." "Kate," he exclaimed again, cheerful and 44 THE PROPHET IN CARNABY MARKET. resigned, and with the true spirit of the un conscious yet real martyr, " I gl6ry in dying, and have no grief now in leaving you, Kate. We have lived happy, we have lived long; we have been ever happy together, but we shall soon now be divided. Why should I fear death ? Nor do I fear it, for I have endeavoured to live as Christ commands, and 1 have sought to ' worship God truly in my own house, and when "I was not seen of men." On the 12th of August, 1828, without a pang, this happy old man gave up his soul to God, with so little struggle at the parting that the watching, tearful wife, did not even know for a time that she was alone with Death. 45 CHAPTEE IIL THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, AND KING CRUIKSHANK. If I wanted an excuse for being tedious, I could not have a better title than "The Origin of Caricature " to head my paper. A fanciful friend of mine, who once challenged a Heidelberg student who had struck him at a beer commerce — a grand Abschied's commerce, in fact — was the next morn ing visited by a deputation of the Swabian Chor, headed by their captain, who reviewing the quarrel, commenced with the creation of Adam. I wUl not imitate the Swabian, however, but premise that directly man began to buUd walls, his chUd ren leamed to draw caricatures of their seniors upon them. As it is natural to man to draw, so it is equaUy natural to man, in malice and 46 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, sport, to exaggerate the infirmities, and detract from the exceUences, of his rivals, superiors, and enemies. All nations have their humorists. Aristophanes was but a Uterary caricaturist when he made a fool of Socrates ; and the author of " Eeinecke Fuchs " was a good example of a jester in mediae val drollery, turning a fable Into an epic. Our middle-age illuminators, too, caricatured, sometimes wilfully, sometimes accidentaUy. When- they drew thread-paper saints with large heads and splay feet, and good-natured lions gaping at Daniel, and with trumpeting {Buffahrmcco) labels issuing from their mouths ; David with the genea logical tree springing from his side; and St- Laurence with the gridiron, anxiously ready for his own cooking. But the better known works of the middle-age caricaturists are those distorted stone heads, which stiU vomit water from the roofs of cathedral towers or old decorated churches : eye-baUs goggling, tongues lolUng, levator muscles pulling and twisting with a coarse, homely, down right fun, which would have quaUfied the de signers to decorate a pantomime with giants and" gobUns enough to people all fairyland, and the AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 47 whole region of the witches' country. AU the fun, of the early morality, plays, and of the three P's, is aU embodied in those eternal jokes that grin at death, looking down upon our country church-yards. But this, if not going back to the creation, is trying back rather too near the deluge for the purposes of the present chapter. It is no use in English art beginning much before Hogarth, because with Hogarth began English art; for Cibber, Lely, Kneller, Gibbons, Scheemackers, were aU foreigners, and were the product of foreign schools. Hogarth alone was pure English", he represented English thoughts, and painted and engraved English scenes, totaUy dlve§iting him self of all foreign influence, though his graver aimed sometimes at somewhat of Callot's playful French grace, and his brush sometimes at the solidity and pure sound colour of the Dutch brewer, Jan Steen. Though greatest as a painter of moral stories, Jlogarth owes much of his fame to the caricatures, with which he scourged a fooUsh age ; generally — not always — weU and wisely ; never basely or for mercenary purposes ; never Uke a bravo or a hired 48 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, stabber, fighting for whichever side payed him best or took him Into pay first. There was scarcely an abuse of his time that he did not lash till the blood came in the long troughs where flesh had once been. He denounced Heidegger's vicious masquerades, Eich's buffoon pantomimes, the licence of elections, French foppery, military misrule, aristocratic extravagance, cruelty to animals, and the horrors of gambling. He drew Wilkes, who had been his boon companion, at' a whist club, with his rat teeth and Satanic eye ; and ChurchUl, the poor abandoned clergyman, as a bear in full canonicals. He laughed at Pitt, and at fooUsh picture-fanciers; at antiquarians and quack doctors; at pompous judges and knavish lawyers; the fop, the daneing-ma^er — the fool of every order met his ready lash, for he had been born to flog vice, and to protest against a corrupt and artificial age. Even in his pictures Hogarth sometimes falls unheedingly into that exaggeration which in real nature is either deformity or caricature. Of these lapses^ which are faults, we may instance the constables in his " Night," out of many other examples. Next in our list of caricaturists comes Bun- AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 49 bury, Walpole's friend, the clever son of a Suffolk baronet, whom Eeynolds over-praised, and whose humorous horse-scenes were in vogue in fashionable circles about 1780 and earlier; Bunbury dying in 1811. Bunbury, though playful, and clever, and good-natured, never seems to me to rise much beyond the mediocrity of amateur art. The drawing is facile, but seldom correct; and without power and knowledge in drawing, the richest humour is always crippled. His horses are skirmish- ingly dashed off, with spirit and readiness, but they are boneless, shapeless things, and mere sketches. The fun, too, is overdone and ex^ travagant, Uke the fun at fairs and small coun try theatres. AU he has to show one is that citizens ride badly, and faU off, and get into ridiculous scrapes ; but there is no Leech-like indivIduaUty about his riders — they are but the puppets that ride round and change dresses at a circus. I prefer Bunbury when he sketches the humours of Bath, and the oddities of the assembly rooms. Then he can be graceful, and give strange groups, such as Macklin laughs at in his admirable, cleverly-written " Man TOL. II. E 50 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, of the World ; " with here and there, among the grimacing Uttle fops and huge aldermen's wives, a pretty face of some " Jessamy Bride," which delights you Uke coming suddenly in a country walk upon some flower you have hitherto not known. No one has better portrayed the stately foUy of the old minuet dancings, but StiU in a lazy, careless, off-hand amateur way, that can scarcely be caUed Art, and Is the mere panto mime of design. 4^ Of Eowlandson's high-coloured, redundant extra vagance, I cannot say much. , It is loathsomely gross too often, and there is a sensuality about the very round billowy lines of his mariner, that reminds me of what a senUe and degraded buf foon Eubens might have sunk to be, had he,' con descended to do nothing but laugh and grin at all purity, aU greatness, and all virtue. StUl there is at times a rare oily fun about Eowlandson in his fat doctors', swollen " parsons," and exuberant, Moll Flaggon women ; in his boisterous fights, and upsets, and horse-play, and conspiracy, that I sup pose corresponded to some stage of the national civUization, and had its counterparts on the stage in the comedians of the day — for the stage has AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 5 I always a powerful influence on the costume and feeling of our genre and small historical art. If Bunbury was a mere vers de societe and smaU- talk man, Eowlandson was a diminutive Swift, with some of the fun and aU the impurity of the baboon, delighting in filth, and unable to be de cent long together. Just, however, as a round hand-writing, and a rounded forehead, indicate meUow good-nature, so, I think, does the round line — the line of fat cheeks and portly stomachs — indicate a certain portion of harmless drollery in our Impure friend Eowlandson. One of his merriest and grossest caricatures represents the crowded staircase of the Eoyal Academy (Somer set House) on exhibition days, with some fair couples faUing backwards, with no more feeling than a prize pig has. Rowlandson delights to represent human beings in moments of great pefU, and draws infinite brutal fun from the cer tain prospect of broken legs and backs. In a word, except for antiquarian reference as to manners and costume, Eowlandson might as well have perished, for his fun Is the fun of Squire Western, after his fourth pint bumper of port ; and It re presents, in its worst aspect, the age of prize-fight- £ 2 52 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, ing, cock-fighting, and gariibling, of wigs and square-toed shoes, of drinking and impurity ; yet here and there I have seen traces of pathos and sublimity in Eowlandson that augur better things ; so let us hope that he was not a bad man, but merely an artist of too little strength of wiU to resist the money and dictations of ignorant and vicious patrons. When I say Eowlandson, I think of a fat pig moulding himself in the mire of a thieves' alley ; but when I write " Gilray," I mention the name of a lurid and great genius indeed, though unfor tunately a genius without moral principle. I do not think much is known of Gilray, except that he worked a slave to print-sellers, who gave him a guinea or two for a caricature, and employed him to ridicule the French EepubUc, whose cause he really in his heart advocated. I beUeve he sank lower and lower in vice and drunkenness, tlU he resorted to attempt to extort money from noblemen whose faces he threatened to introduce into his caricatures unless bribed off; and I have heard, I think, somewhere that he ended his days by a raving drunken leap from a window in which he had been confined : but much of this is doubt- AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 53 ful, SO let us hope the good alone is true, and all the bad is false. To me there is something luridly awful in Gilray's apocalyptic visions of the French Ee pubUc, in the perpetual dripping crimson of his never-resting guiUotine axe, in his red skeletons that stalk about Napoleon — the yel low dwarf, the hideous, lean resurrection man of these poisonous libels, which express all the hatred of a rude age, and of a virulence unequalled in venom and intensity. Napoleon slicing the world as if it were a great pudding — Napoleon a strutting mannikin in Farmer George's Brobdignag hand — ^Napoleon leading his murdering scarecrows towards England — Napoleon everywhere in every attitude of con tempt, ridicule, and loathsomeness. Pitt per petually lean, cold, and saucy; Fox a brutal, black-browed butcher, the very horror of the revolution, seen by us through the red smoke of battle-fields, dwells upon the works of Gil ray, that strong hater, who gave " no quarter," and who always showed how detestable the thing he hated was, before he ground his heel into the face on which he had already set his 54 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, foot. He stands on the Channel shore, and keeps shouting to the French, "Babe killers — priest stabbers — king murderers — women de stroyers — atheist -assassins — come here, and we'll sweep you from the earth ! " AU very intemperate and unphilosophical ; but the little island was In danger then, and it made us aU lose our temper to feel that we were in danger from the Corsican — thp little lean man who had risen no one knew how. And as for George III., Gilray laughed at his dulness and average inteUect worse than Peter Pindar himself, but never with the bitterness that George IV. was assailed with when he persecuted his ill-judging, coarse wife, and offended the whole nation with his foul and disgraceful amours. A heartless, vicious ruler of men, frivolous, extravagant, and latterly person aUy repulsive, was too good a butt for carica turists to resist firing their poisoned arrows at; and though some were bought off, and others sUenced, in days when Leigh Hunt could be imprisoned for smiling at the bloated Adonis of Carlton House, and the press had no real free dom, caricature was no bad safety-valve for AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 55 the wrath and hatred of an overtaxed and angry nation. Cmikshank was the direct lineal descendant of Gilray — so much so, that he actually finished with his own hands some of that great toma- hawker's unfinished plates. With less mature skill, more fun, and less burning vitriolic hatred, the young' humorist set to work, for stray guineas, to perpetuate the national anti pathy against Napoleon, whose star had now set amid the snows of Eussia. It is strange how Providence seems to give each mind its proper food: Gilray, violent, stubborn, and aggres sive, had had the uphill game, the hopeless attack on a resistless conqueror; Cmikshank, the younger, swifter tiralUeur, now the great gun had ceased its steady, hitherto unremitting volleys, leaped out of the dark ambush, and prepared to sting the rear of the retreating army, and hold it up to the ridicule of Eu rope. He showed the Frenchmen in rags faU ing under the Eusslan axes ; and he laughs as he draws. He is calmer and more fanciful than Gilray, and seldom gross, but when he deforms the Eegent, and shows vice "its own" Medusa 56 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, " image." He draws grotesque images of Napo leon being snuffed out, and finally leaves him at Elba, with a contemptuous face, the chained-up scorn of bleeding Europe. At a later period this great humorist takes far higher flights, changes GUray's coarse, whip lash line, and heavy blacks and whites, for the graver's finest needle, and joins the richest and most kindly fancy to the most delicate and exquisite manipulations, and the most refined and correct drawing caricaturist has yet at tained — (we except Mr. Tenniel, of the Punch staff, because, though a rare draughtsman, he seems to me by nature to have a mind more serious than humorous.) But how can I find room to eulogize the great wealth of fancy of this artist — his here and there flashes of real weird imagination'; his pathos, and the purity of his purpose; the generous warmth and chivalry of his moral nature? I will, therefore, from the reams of fun he has scattered over the England he has done so much to make merry — from the great nations of droll beings who invisibly will attend him some (let us hope distant) day to AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 57 his time-honoured grave — from the long shelves of books he has enriched and improved — from the drolleries, whimsies, and fantasies that made our fathers' sides shake, and still hover like motes in the sun, and shoot to and fro in our English air like dragon-flies across a sum mer brook — from all these let me select two or three examples of the versatUity and depth, magic and originality, of the genius of Cmik shank. It must never be imagined that Cmikshank derived any fun from the great treasury of Charles Dickens: his fun is his own, but it was partly contemporaneous with "Boz" and "Pickwick," and deals largely with the same materials. Two men discovered that great vein of fun, just as two astronomers contem poraneously put up their telescopes and "brought doAvn" the last planet. Cmikshank rioted in all the early fun of the present still grinning epoch ; some branches of fun he originated, others he improved. He had his little army of black figures; he vivified, like Irving and Dickens, furniture, and all dumb things, from fire-irons to the corks of wine 58 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, bottles. Apropos of this, we must not forget the Irish faces In the whiskey-bottle corks, and the unequalled, chubby, groggy faces he devised from the nipply ends of two bisected lemons. For weird force, and as an embodied ghost- story, as a flash of Ught on a dark Eembrandt- night, as showing his imaginative goblin som- breness, George V. never did anything so ad mirable and so excelling as his "WUl of the Wisp," across which, as across a dying wit's face, passes a ghastly gleam of humour. Talk of Fuseli and his wind-bag, there is real, vivid imagination enough in this to make a whole Academy of FuseUs. It is just an Egyptian dark ness, with breaking through it above a bog-hole, some black bulrushes, and above them a bending, leathery goblin, exulting over some drowned traveller, the meteor lamp he carries casting a downward flicker on the dark water. Such dark ness, such wicked speed, such bad, Puck-Uke malice, such devilry, Hoffman and Poe together could not have better devised; many a May Exhibition has not half the genius in all its pic tures that focusses in that gem of jet. As a book lUustrator, Cmikshank has given AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 59 many an author life, and doubled the power of many even clever books. Even Dickens, in his " Oliver Twist," had his fine gold jeweUed by Cmikshank. Ainsworth's tawdry rubbish — now aU but forgotten, and soon to sink deep in the mud- pool of oblivion — was iUuminated with a false splendour by this great humorist. He revelled over SmoUett's broad, practical joking, and over sea-stories innumerable; but his best work was the " Irish EebelUon," whose horrors he has treated with great dramatic intensity, and a truth to nature which few of our Academicians, with all their bones, and muscles, and varnishes, and receipts, could surpass. A Uving critic, with the usual special pleading of a man who speaks either ignorantly of his subject, or is too anxious for victory in argument to care much about exact truth, takes on him to lament that Art patronage should stiU be such In our commercial country that the grave, thought ful genius of Cmikshank should have been devoted to merely Ulustrate "Jack Shephard," and the horrors of the " Irish EebelUon." Now, this is all sophistry, and a mere trick of argument ; for the greatest works of Cmikshank, 60 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, as the clever but wllfuUy blind arch critic very well knows, are neither the "EebelUon" nor the Thief Novels Illustrations, but the Comic Annuals, the "Eesults of Crime," the "WiU ofthe Wisp," the Sic transit, &c. &c. merely to dip out a few pailfuls of the vast ocean of fun that George Cmikshank has been deluging the English world with for the last forty years, anticipating Dickens, forestalling Thackeray, and handing down the touch of national humour direct from Hogarth and Gilray to Leech and Hablot Brown. The Irish Rebellion sketches, though probably drawn without nature or models, without much knowledge of any Irishmen but the Irishmen of St. Giles's, and any Ireland but the Ireland of stage scenery, are yet wonderfiil for their dra matic force, intense pathos, rising even to the frontiers of the horrible, and technically for their admirable clair-obscur, and the exquisite needle point delicacy of the etching. The national face is studied with great, though restricted, truth; and the drawing, though not academic or over strained. Is eminently easy and admirable. With wonderful versatility of imagination (for the mind trained to do everything becomes versatile if AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 61 it has any power at all— if it has not it snaps short at one duU mannerism), the artist shows a ghastly phase of that terrible civil war, with Napper Tandy, and Emmet, and Lord Fitzgerald flitting like spectres through every scene. There are the peasants In the hidden forge sharpening their pikes, with rude madmen, in frieze coats, dancing jigs of joy on the tables; while other rebels, meditating bloodshed, sit upon powder-barrels, and drink. The strongest bits of Celtic terror in Carleton are here anticipated and surpassed. Then there are sterner scenes, where forty pikes at once are meeting in a soldier's breast, and shrieking, maddened women pray for mercy ; and there Is an admirable scene (exciting as Cooper's struggles with Indians), where some loyalists are defending a house against the rebels, and some are melting lead for buUets, at the fire-place, and others are firing through holes in the riddled window shutters; while, at a table, an officer sits with all the calmness of professional habit, and gives out ammunition, or' writes a despatch for reinforcements. In these iUustrations, lurid with battle-smoke, and unsurpassed for their realization of the horror, movement, and fury of 62 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, such scenes, Cmikshank shows himself no longer the mere caricaturist, writing out fun in ciphers, but the tme artist, excellent in light and shade, in composition, and in the power of touching the heart. It is true. Leech has since his climacteric shown us higher life, more graceful girls, prettier faces, and more fashionable and more modern " swells." Leech draws a horse better, and knows more practicaUy the fun and the gaticheries of hunting, shooting, and fishing; Gilbert has more colour, more picturesqueness, more of the Eubenesque richness in his draperies; Phiz is more arch and naive ; Keane more Duresque and a,rtistic; but in moral purpose, heart, and variety, Cmikshank is stIU pre-eminent, and technicaUy as an etcher no needle has ever been found to surpass his. His Sio transit, or sketch of the passengers in a Dover boat going on shore, is grand in its breadth of humour as well as in Its truth. It makes one almost sea-sick to look at its seesaw. Its dreadful up to heaven, and down again unto hell ; its frightened, head- aching, giddy travellers, and joUy, careless sailors, who like " a Uttle sea on," because it makes the AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 63 passengers less inclined to dispute the exorbitant demands ofthe Dover boatmen. In a later view of Cruikshank's the artist has given us a fat German baron, half way to Calais, beginning to feel the motion, and clinging to the steamer rigging, which also, as epitomising the horrors of sea-sickness, is little short of perfect. After all, that wonderful and mysterious transi tory yet incurable malady is the best guarantee we have against invasion. Six folio volumes of fun and pathos are no mean result of a great etcher's life-labours, and it is from a study of these that we deduce the fact that at a certain stage of his career a great moral change came over the humorist, and from that moment the desire to do good became the pre dominant passion vrithin him — a noble impulse arose within Cmikshank (pushed to an intolerant extravagance on one philanthropic point) to work for the world which he had so long amused. He set himself, tooth and naU, to abate our great na tional shame of drunkenness, and against vice in general directed arrows feathered as from the humming-bird's wing, but barbed with the keen est and brightest steel. 64 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, Amopg those works with a high moral purpose, which raise him from the amuser to the instructor, .1 may speciaUy Instance the " Progress of Crime," with its series of tableaux of the gradations of sin, with the prison corridors and all the corrective apparatus, ending with the last bitter lesson of the gibbet; and in the centre that dreadful typical sketch of the murderer thrust by a devil over a precipice, the bloody knife still in his hand, and large blocks of stone bound to either of his feet, to sink him swifter into the heU whose licking flames he sees rising eagerly to strike him with their fiery fangs. There seems to me quite as much thought, and heart, and moral power about this work as about any of Hogarth's or Durer's ; and I am fitmly convinced that Cmikshank, when he dies (which may God long avert), and Death has given a sacred character to his works, in our national collection of English Art (if we ever have one) will be one of our most vene rated old masters. To rapidly epitomize what I think is most sur passing in Cruikshank's works, I may mention his Eembrandtic nightmare of the " Headsman sharpening his Axe," from Ainsworth's melodra- AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 65 matie novel, " Tower of London." A wonderful weird dusk, with no light but that which glim mers on the bald scalp of the hideous headsman, who, feeling the edge of his axe vrith his thumb, grins with a deviUsh foretaste of his pleasure on the morrow. I need scarcely say that all the poe try, dramatic force, mystery, and terror of the design is attributable to Cmikshank, and not to Ainsworth, whose novels are suited only for me lodramatic shop-boys and romantic ladles'-malds, and whose sham supernatural scenes are borrowed from the immoral and overstrained tragedies of the Victoria Theatre. But peace to his manes ! — he is forgotten ; so after a fitful feVer he sleeps well, and I would not disturb his swift passage to obUvion. Already I have tried to show that, although In the humour of London life, and indeed of life universal, no one but Shakspere has yet surpassed our Dickens ; still, in the special phases of tavern life, thief life, and theatre Ufe, &c., Cmikshank had already attained triumphs when the " Sketches by Boz " proved that a new genius of boundless comic faculty was rising above the horizon. We have shown that, beginning as a direct descendant VOL. II. F 66 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, of GUray, lashirig George IV. with the serpent whip of satire, Cmikshank passed graduaUy into the modern book-iUustrator and the mo dern humorist; passing out of the old conven tional, buflSaon, scurrilous form of humour, and originating the modern, the more playful and more truthful mode of laughing at social follies, which, after all, are seldom laughed down, and live their fooUsh life in spite of aU protests, however arigry. I have shown him as adorn ing our standard novels, SmoUett's broad drol lery, and Fielding's mock heroics, and I have shown him at once the poet and the satirist, the comedian and the tragedian. I look upon him with veneration^ as an artist who, if fortune had permitted him, and ambition had driven him, in early life, to devote, himself to large collective works, even if he had never painted, would have rivaUed, if not excelled, Hogarth. But, perhaps, he had no motive power of ambition; perhaps he had not a mind sufficiently large and harmonious in its constructive power. Certain it is, his genius has been rubbed into bread-crumbs by the very necessity perhaps of making bread. He has filled six foUos, but he has done nothing AND KING CRUIKSHANK. 67 like the "Rake's Progress." Many ofhis book-Ulus- trations will perish with the books they Ulustrate, and have no legs to stand on. Attached to such frivolous insanity as that of Ainsworth's they re mind one of those precious china plates that the early Italian builders sometimes plastered up in their duU stone waUs. They are as out of place as real jewels would be on the dresses of Madame Tussaud's murderers in the Cham ber of Horrors. It is always sad to see genius adorning fire-screens or carving-knife handles. "Fire George" Cmikshank deserved a better fate than to be half his Ufe painting complexions upon barber's dummies, and trying to render folly immortal. The Eegent's age, the Brummel epoch of the short waist and shoulder of mutton sleeves, was specially his own. That worst of kings, de bonair and selfish, handsome and cruel, gracious and obese, the most bland and cold-hearted of men, was lashed by Cmikshank with remorseless severity. He has Uved, like Dickens, to see two ages : to laugh at coachmen, and to laugh at rail ways ; to show us the skeleton coach and the de mon raUway engine. He has laughed tiU he is f2 68 THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, tired, and so grows serious with his upas-tree and his Bottle. But thrpugh all his pleasant world of fairy stories, through his Wapping (his saUors are inimitable) and his Whitechapel (for his thieves are the very creatures), there have been always (with few exceptions) two great deficiencies in Cmikshank's work. The first is a Londoner's Ignorance of, and indifference to, the country, which makes his backgrounds generally weak and meagre, and prevents him showing in nature sym pathy vrith man ; for instance, trees weeping and tossing their arms over the drowned creature, &c.; even Hogarth had the same defect. Se condly, his female faces are always mannered and insipid, generaUy ugly. He can seldom give any expression to a female face, unless he make it ugly; of beauty he has all the imperfect -con ceptions of a mind a little warped in favour of ugliness by a love of caricature, and Impeded in expressing even what it knows by an ignorance of the human form in its construction and its changes. Latterly, I beUeve, with almost the self-denying wisdom and " pluck" of Cato, who began Greek AND KING CRUIKSHANK. , 69 at seventy, Cmikshank, I hear, entered the boys' class at the Academy, and on hard stool, vrith dravring-board between his venerable knees, set hard to work to laboriously portray in stippled chalk the matchless graces of the Medicean Venus. 70 CHAPTEE IV. MEN OP PROMISE. — PROCTER AND DEARE. "The grave of a man of promise!" — what a text for the moralist ! ShaU our poets shed stage tears in honeyed verse at seeing frost kill the March violets,, or the rough wind of the month vrith the lion's breath snapping off a budding bough, and shall we not do weU to sit down for a moment upon the grave-stone of young genius ? Death is terrible when he strikes the chUd — Death is even more terrible when he comes to the young man, and casts him down the dark trap door into the black river. It is difficult to say at such times, with the Turk, "Khismet" — it is ordained; it gives us great spasms at the heart, PROCTER AND DEARE. 71 and pains in the brain, to see life snapped in the middle, and the rude black pen suddenly drawn across aU the sketches of great resolves, high hopes, and mighty aspirations. When one recalls the kindling eye, the warm hand that grasped one's own so often with the silent grasp of friend ship. It is difficult to imagine a cold weight of earth stopping that glowing pulse, fettering that wise hand, clogging that eager eye. Is the man of promise prisoned under the turf? — what divine voice bade that heart grow cold, and those limbs forget their duty? — what removed him from us ere his work seemed done ? — who took the chisel from this hand and the brush from that, and bade, them go sleep under the heavy stpne untU the judgment? The AU-seeing, the All-wise, sent the Angel of Death to call them away, — these two we are now the temporary biographers of — that we know ; but before the causes of that summons hangs the great curtain of night. That unseen hand is moving among the crowd in every street, but it seizes only those whose hour is come. Death Is but God's messenger, and aU he does Is well, because God wills it. A hundred years ago, the name of Thomas 72 MEN OP PROMISE. Procter, now forgotten, was great among the sculptors of England. He was a student of the Eoyal Academy, and the black river-god of Somerset House had seldom stared at a youth of greater promise. He was of humble birth— that is, he had the disadvantage of beirig poor, a disgrace only to those who are base enough to think it so — and was born at Settle, in the West Eiding of Yorkshire — a hardy, horse- breaking province, where the men are toughened by the sea air, and rendered kindly wise by the necessity of struggUng more for life and life's needs than we are in the more tepid and en feebled south. He was a man of the wolds !—- perhaps of Danish blood, or with some tang of a purer and less mixed race than your flat lower provinces, vrith their squared-out and super-divided meadow, can muster — something of the Scotsman's tenacity, craft, and endur ance lingered about the horse-taming York shireman. The Northman's luxuries are the Southron's necessities ; and I have no doubt that, if civil war were possible in England, the southern counties would soon be over run and conquered by the northern. Home- PROCTER AND DEARE. 73 sickness is a disease unknown to the Scotch man, as we aU are aware : the man who did not live on grass and thistles could snatch no Uving, if he dared to struggle for Ufe, among a circle of Yorkshire traders. But in saying this, we do but jest. The Yorkshire blood is pure, and strong, and hot, though it may be a Uttle cool and slow in pulsation. The Yorkshire body is a good stock for the worker, whether with brain or hand ; and stouter and more stalwart men are not to be found than are to be met with in the bleak Eidlngs. We presume that Procter started with a good country capital of health — no bad basis for the bank of life, say what you will. What early instinct, what accidental preponderance of certain faculties led Procter, the young Yorkshireman, to sculpture, we shall never now know. Some drawing in the nursery, perhaps, some book of prints, some stray pic ture, waif and stray of soine great house gone to pieces, kindled the first ambition in the heart, and fed that snake that grew tiU it swallowed up all the other passions. Steong enough at first to be called genius. 74 MEN OP PROMISE, to enlist friends, and to vrin believers in father and mother, it does not seem to have been ; for in due time the swarthy, . black- haired boy was bound apprentice to a tobac conist at Manchester, to which siiioky town he repaired, to weigh spongy masses of the narcotic weed, to number i cigars, to dip out sheUs of snuff for old women, to perch on stools, and run all day up and down tedious columns of figures, to compare, to add up, to balance — in fact, to narrow a large and grow ing mind with a routine of petty duties. This provincial work soon became intolerable. The ambltionless, idealess, money-making Manchester men were no meet companions for the high- souled, ardent young sculptor, with perpetual fire working at his heart and brain — to whom the earth itself seemed too smaU a scope for his ambition, and who could play jugglers' tricks with the very, sun and brother planets, were his hand as large as his ambition. He goes up to London, and enters vrith new hopes and fresh wings the house of Messrs. Harrison and Ansley, merchants. But who can stop the sea when the dyke is once broken down ? No- PROCTER AND DEARE. 75 thing now vriU do but devoting a whole life to Art. Imagine his ardent letters home, down in Yorkshire,, showing that giving up something for nothing is the nearest, way to eam thou sands. In 1777 he becomes a happy student of the Eoyal Academy, eager to grow his own gold tree, and to surpass in fame even that rough misanthropic genius, Irish Barry; or. In his own special art, the great EoubUliac. His mind fluctuates between the two goddesses, of painting and sculpture. In both arts, however antagonistic they may appear, he obtains tri umphs; and all the time he works on the hard benches of the academic schools. He is treated kindly and as a friend by the merchants he had left — at both their houses, at Tottenham and Clapham,. he hangs up his cocked hat with equal pleasure ; he drinks their wine, and tells studio stories, he rhapsodizes, in the midst of mercantUe talkj about the Venus de Medici and the Belvidere ApoUo — about Eome and its sculptor's heaven. The same fire that burnt in the mail of promise who died yesterday in the Temple or Gray's Inn, bumt In the heart of the, young Yorkshireman. Give him time 76 MEN OP PROMISE. and opportunity, and he wUl grapple with even the great Florentine himself; no fence is too -high for his horse, no ditch too broad. He is the centre of a band of young men, the central planet in the Ufe- schools at Somerset House. If he wanted mo ney, his old employers give it him — for they, at least, know his worth, and beUeve in his genius. Barry's picture of . " Venus rising from the Sea," a well-drawn but coldly classical sub ject to our eye, fired this swarthy youth to paint a large and ambitious scene of " Adam and Eve," illustrating a passage of "Paradise Lost;" though not a mechanicaUy good paint ing, stiU -vrinning great applause from bewUdered rivals and pleased superiors. A few years later, and the young Yorkshireman gained a premium from the Sooiety of Arts, and a sUver medal from the Eoyal Academy. The next year, he crowns his triumph by carrying off the Academy gold medal by an historical picture, and his grasp and vigour are now ad mitted. Cpttage interiors and every-day happiness. PROCTER AND DEARE. 77 are nothing to our man of promise — ^the real is far too vulgar a thing for his great am bition. He lives in dream-world, among straight- nosed goddesses and weU-made Apollos. He thinks no one can become an old master without painting Greek noses, so he strains a monstrous white canvas, and designs " Venus approaching the Island of Cyprus," — as if the Isle of Dogs did not behove us more than Cyprus, and our own " not unlmpossible she" more than all the dead stone Venuses with the frozen simpers and the blank eyes. StiU the man of promise knew uo better, and what he thought he ought to do, he did — which is more than some of us can say. I suppose, with his strong will and fervid speech, the short, sturdy Yorkshireman, with the swarthy skin and enormous coal black whiskers, was a great favourite among the hot bloods of the studios, with their ready belief in budding genius and profound sympathy with men of promise. At aU events, we hear that when Procter gained the gold medal, and some bland mediocrity read his name out to the hot, eager 78 MEN OP PROMISE. faces, they seized the black-eyed lad of the West Eiding, hurried him downstairs, and everitually carried him on their shoulders round the broad quadrangle of Somerset. House, much to the wonder of the sooty figure of the Thames. AU this Barry, the truculent and pugnacious, saw with kindUng eyes, and shouted " Blood and oons! the Greeks did it-^-do it again, boys — do it again!" which must have so laced Procter for many pangful midnights, and have sent Barry home with ideas for his Adelphi pictures, and the Olympic Games episode. To work goes the black-bearded Yorkshire- man, as one of his horse-taming race should; no tobacco now, save to smoke as balsam for mental wounds, while he pinches, and thumbs, and kneads the stupid clay into forms of beauty, that the man of promise beUeves fashioned for the pantheon of genius and the palace ¦ of eternity. Alas ! it is but grave clay he kneads, and the black face is behind every mask that hangs upon his humble waUs. God's promises are children ; the devil's are the juggling dreams with which genius such PROCTER AND DEARE. 79 as Procter's is beguiled to death. Procter works with his tooth-brush handles, his steel scoops ahd scrapers, his sculptor's tools, in short. He creates out of clay wonderful works, which are never to become stone. His "Ixion on the Wheel, rolling in Torture," draws crowds of cocked-hatted and spectacled men, who look at each other and smile as Sir Joshua Eeynolds, drawing out that wine- filterer of an ear-trumpet, tells Mr. West the work is admirable — and Mr. West, of course, who praises everything, says It Is admirable, too; so that Sir Abraham Hume thinks it a safe investment, and buys it, giving guineas for clay — one sort of earth for another — lead for gold, as Procter's friends think ; though that one-ideaed old NoUekens says, "He don't see why Procter should make the man Ixion going round on the Catherine-wheel with his eyes closed, for he (Nolly) could not sleep If he had the toothache, much, less on the Catherine- wheel : " but then NoUy does not Uke men who dare large works, and are fools enough to neg lect profitable bustos. Then Procteifs Piri- thous was very good; and he tried to excel, 80 MEN OP PROMISE like Michael Angelo, both in sculpture and painting. But the clouds of fate began to darken over the man of promise. His ambition was sometimes greater than his powers of per formance. On one occasion he sent a huge mainsail of a picture — a Dmidical subject ; oakwoods Uke enormous cabbages, and bed- gowned Druids. I fear the council shrugged their shoulders at it, and advised him to put more work into it. There was mind in the sketch, but not much paint. It was such a monster of a picture — such a rickety, hydro cephalic child, with so little brain, that the councU had to give him a painting-room on the premises; where the porter doubtless gave him friendly hints, and received vrith perfect composure the black scorn of the Yorkshire- man of promise. Busy at the bed-gown Druids, Procter worked for several days on the mainsail : but the members of the council who dropped in, dropped out again, fataUy silent, and squinting violently at the Druids, as sham Druids — whether in pictures or on the stage — always, make you do. They begged Uttle bitter Northcote to go PROCTER AND DEARE. 81 and look at it, and. he went and squinted too; and so, after aU, the picture was never exhibited, but the council, with many bland bows and smirks, and looking over spectacles silvery and golden, pretended to the black-whiskered man of promise that the Druids were too large for Somerset House, and not a word was said about the want of expression and the flimsy painting. Like a famous fresco of mo dern times, the great picture was, we fear, a fiasco. What claims to fame Procter had as a painter it is indeed difficult to dis cover, for Northcote, a lemon of a man, said Procter's paintings were poor, but spoke of him highly as a modeller; while NoUekens, the sculptor, said Procter excelled In paint ing, and was not much in clay. Now, a painter praising a man's sculpture and con demning his painting, and a sculptor praising his painting and condemning his sculpture, sounds rather dubious to our suspicious ears, distrustful of men of promise who are not men of performance. * * * * « « Perhaps those unlucky sham Druids led TOL. II. G 82 MEN OP PROMISE. Procter into trouble; for ten years a crape veU of mist and premature obUvibn shuts him from our sight- all we know is, that among other low, material vexations,, such as milk scores and angry, "nagging" lamdladiesj he had to dig a hole in the, floor of his room, so as to enable it to contain his enormous model of "Diomedes thrown to his Horses, that be had fed on Human Fleshi" It was too big for his house — and it proved too big for the houses of the cognoscenti, for no one- bought^ it; and Procter, unable to pay for hire of a warehouse, broke it to pieces with his own hand, hiE| heart aching at each blow. O ye who have dreamed for years over some thought, which vrith sweat 'of brain ye have, at last, transformed to book, or statue, or picture, suddenly to see iti snipped to pieces by critics' poisoned scissors, or left un heeded by the crowd who passed on to see the last juggler balance his feathers on his nose, imagine, as no others can, the agony of this destruction! Ten years have passed ' since the shifling gold PROCTER AND DEARE. 83 iriedal vvas placed in the sv^arthy brown hand of Procter ; and that useful body, the Eoyal Academy^ have left their man of promise to starve in obscurity — to break up the wPfk of his lone rididriights in the paroxysm of despair. * * * * * Ten sad years pass, and the period arrives that a student is to be sent to Rome by the Eoyal Acadeiriy, The respecta,ble snow-bewig- ged mediocrities, over their comfprtable vrine, remember the clever gold-medal student,' and fix upon Procter. Mr. West, always mediocre, arid always amiable, agrees to find him — to dive for hiiri, and bring him up by the locks. Where is he? No one can find him, or hear anything of him. He Is buried in black London — drowned in the muddy, weedy sea of poverty. At the time that Mr. West, with kind but yet tardy zeal, is searching for the entombed genius, singularly enough, Fortuflfe, also rather tardy, has sent another friend : Mr, Elding, a painter and picture-dealer, fornierly an inti mate friend of Procter's, is also looking for him, and finds him. The clouds break for g2 84 , MEN OP PROMISE. Procter; the blue shows. Biding observes hia friend's disturbed and restless manner; he sees that he Is entangled In a Nessus net of debts, and that his one wish Is to become free, Eiding put forth all his strength to help him. He goes, privately to a man who holds a note against Procter for money lent. It is a wea pon that may be at any moment used against the" man of promise. He goes and represents his poor friend's distress. He appeals to the lender, and touches his heart. He so wins him over that the note is thrown on the fire, and flies a red tinder up the chimney, the mischievous devU that lurked in It being ex orcised by that process. It is late at night when the devil is dismissed ; and early next moming Elding wiU rise and tell Procter. Happy at his success, Eiding goes home to sleep Ughtly, as good men can do. In the meantime, Mr. West has dug up Procter, and been to his lodgings in Maiden Lane. He finds him cowering over a heap of clay, in the obscure lodging, • in a deplorably reduced state — weak, helpless, and desponding. The weU-dressed, comfortable man looks at him PROCTER AND DEARE. 85 with eyes of pity, relieves him, invites him to dinner, offers him letters of introduction to Eoman friends, and determines to send hiin as tutor to his own (West's) son to Eome. He leaves him, brushing his cocked hat, and blandly expressing his regret at Procter's genius having been so long neglected. He shakes him by the hand, and wishes him "good night." The next morning dawns hopeful and bright, and vrith it, to the humble door opposite the Cider Cellar in Maiden Lane, comes Eiding. He pushes back the dirty, careless drudge, who knows nothing about Mr, Procter — he Is upstairs in a moment ; he thrusts open the bed-room door — no answer; he caUs anxiously; he shouts his good tidings — no response; he runs to the bed, drags down the tawdry, tucked-in curtains, pulls back the sheet — there is the great black fell of hair on the piUow, but the face pale, and the jaw sunk. The man of promise has died before he became a man of performance. * * * * * But we must move from the death-bed of one man of promise to the grave of another. Un- 86 MEN OP PROMISE. like that of Procter, it is far from the smoke tbat boils perpetuaUy over the "dim spot" that men caU London; it is pip tl?at lonely burial-grpuijid outside the walls of Eome where Keats sleeps, under th,e shad.ow of the toy py ramid of Caius Cestui, within hearing of those slceletpn chariots that nightly race along thp adjacent Applan way, what time the nightin- gajes are toUing at their delicious inspiration of song. It is the grave pf Deare, the young English sculptor who Ues in this garden ojf deatjti; and it is of the dream-bubbles of his life, and their evaporation into grains of church yard dust, tljat I have now to treat. Deare was of a humble Liverpool stock; those irrestrainable Instinpts vvhich, when alUed tp pov)rer and energy, constitute genius, led him, frpm a boy, fo observe the shape and outUne of objects that surrounded him, and to try to reproduce them — a tendency which, in a low mind, is apish, but in a high one is nothing but divine. At ten, after much chip ping aijd scraping of a resultless kind, he pro- driped a small skeleton carved by himself with his own school penknife. It was rather an ominous, PROCTER AND DEARE. 87 ghastly production:; but so it was that, day after day, that thoughtful boy, rosy with health, and intent on his self-imposed task, had sat down beside a real skeleton, and studied its central idolumm, its globular 'grim skull, re producing in wood every socket of the vertebrae, every ridge and furrow of that wonderful ground-plan of the Deity — that first sketch of Adam — ^that scafeld on which our house of clay is reared. Ori that little wooden puzzle, only six inches and a half high, that boy had laboured like a young Baron Trenck, wUing away weary hours of prison gloom with this task of laborious idleness; and aU that time, could he but have seen it, the skeleton grinned and waited for the appointed time when he would be permitted to put forth his bony claw, and clutch his victim. Between school hours our genius, sadly iri- different to sticky sugar-casks, wadded cotton bales, and red-lined ledgers, devoted, all his spare time to copying prints and engravings, bought for him by his proud father. His genius ran to Homeric subjects — to the vast and grand; and what in other minds was a dunghUl on a 88 MEN OP PROMISE. village common, was to him a boundless prairie and the illimitable ocean. Long afterwards his eyes used to glow and his nostrils dUate at read ing of the tramp of Homer's horsemen, or the clang of the wounded as they feU beside the Scamander. No difficulties lie, like " caltrops " for cavalry, in the way of this young genius — the sun smiles, the sky is of a perpetual blue. He goes up to the great black London. He is articled, with much hopefulness, to a Mr. Thomas Carter, in Piccadilly, in a small house now erased by a larger one. He is set at carving chimney- pieces, and although only sixteen, 'soon becomes icelebrated for his exquisite taste and skiU. But ^this vrill not suffice him ; he goes to the Academy, where NoUekens is visitor, and where Flaxman and Procter are beginning to get known, and drawing so weU that the startled new comer is driven to modeUIng, being afraid of their competition. In 1780, though then only twenty, he carries off the gold medal at the Academy for a model of (Milton's) Adam and Eve. There is no Umit to what this genius may do. He wiU be the greatest Liverpool, greatest PROCTER AND DEARE. 89 English, greatest European sculptor. If won derful at twenty, what will he be at forty? Alas ! could riot that skeleton have answered had heaven given it back for a moment a tongue ? The genius vmtes home in high spirits. The world grows wider round him — ^perpetual sun shine for him gilds black London. Mr. Carter, " a blustering f eUow, but ar good man," as he tells his father — making, I suppose, much easy gold by the ready, skilful hand of the Liverpool genius — is going ("he thinks") to give him half-a-guinea a week for the first part of his apprenticeship, and fifteen shillings for the latter end of that terrii of bearable slavery. He is fuU of stories of EoubiUiac, and Schee macker's, and Spang the Dane, who taught Nol- lekens, and produced the small anatomical figure that artists stUl use. He tells his father of how he attended the dissections of dead mur derers and thieves at Surgeon's HaU — how he went and watched their pale bodies with the blue rings round the necks flayed — as Hogarth once did, when he drew his hideous picture of Tom Nero being anatomized. Deare was present 90 MEN OP PROMISJ!. when a " fine subject " — some murderer or highwayman — was removed to the Somerset House (in a chair or a coach, we suppose), and bent into the position of the Dying Gladiator for the use of the Eoyal Academy, where the "fine subject" stUl is an ornament useful to young anatomists. The casts in Surgeons' Hall, hideous but to the eyes of science, being one h3,lf red and flayed, and the other whole, of untoyched skin, especiaUy delighted hun. AU this time there is a care and pmdence in the young genius not uncommendable. He takes great plea&urp in telling his friends that crafty Npllekens got most of his money by buying and sellipg antique figiires ; and that Van GUdar, one of his fellow- wor km en, " who is one of the best hands in London for foliage," and whp "cut that large figure in our shop," had saved a thousand pounds by keeping men at work for him at home, whUe he got his humble two guineas a week at Carter's shop. Carter is one of those men who know hew to use clever men, and get himself thp praise for what others do. He "screwed down" the young crafts men, and paid them UberaUy vrith promises — PROCTER AND DEARE. 91 a sort of mental assignat that your Pecksniff of every profession is liberal in, whether he be your editor who is praised for what a corre spondent has written, or your sculptor who is praised for what his workmen have achieved. Carter, in this way, gets great credit for a monument for unlucky .General BwgPyiie'iS lady, and for a rich tablet for a chijnney- piece. Deare does not neglept his study pf more serious things aU this time : he is determined tp go through the whole course of the antique, from Adonis to Venus, from A to Z — men, women, phildren — ;aU the stone family that the G^6ek^ left us : he vriU draw and draw tiU he know? them thoroughly, inside aiid outside, muscle and flesh ; he will take to piepes, in fact, the old Greek puzzle, and, by help of Surgeons' HaU, put it together again, so that hp may in time leam the art of constructing sImUar puzzles. The genius of Liverpool prepares, with much fear and trembling, to compete for the 4oaderoy gold meda,l. Ecstein, a German who works in "Tom" Carter's shop, is one competitor-r- the third faUs iU, and is therefore " scratched." 92 MEN OP PROMISE. Ecstein Is already known as the designer of Townsend's monument in Westminster Abbey, a work that Flaxman thought very well of, and, being twice as old and big as Deare, looms with undue grandeur in the imagination of the genius. The day comes, the names of the subjects for the best historical design in clay and on canvas are put into a cup — the painters first, the sculptors next. Both professions have five hours to make their proof sketches in. The sculptor's" subject is, " The Angels Surprising Satan at the Ear of Eve." Deare thumbs and squeezes the clay; his sketch is pronounced surprising, his friends only lament that such early success wIU render him conceited, or make him neglect his studies. The day of decision comes ; there is a dreadful silence as bland Sir Joshua, beaming in gUtter- ing spectacles, stands up and declares the gold medal is adjudged to " the model marked E, the production of Mr. John Deare." The students, who know Deare for a lively, generous, open- hearted, frank man, murmur their congratula tions. The secretary calls " John Deare." The genius, aU of a fiery blush, bustles through the mob, receives the medal, and stands there PROCTER AND DEARE. 93 timidly before the President and council till the lecture is over. Proudly he writes home to teU his father that his model is to be carried to Buckingham Palace, to be admired by the King and Queen ; proudly he tells them that the Satan was modelled opposite a mirror from his own face, distorted by grimaces for the pur pose ; proudly, and with pride no man could blame, he entreats his father not " to part with that DevU," but to keep it tUl his brothers, Ned or Joe, had " taste and ability " enough to value It as a gem. How soon these young geniuses acquire the trick of royalty, learn to sway the sceptre with the conventional grace, and trail the royal purple in the old Csesar way! Still, the true metal shows itself — real genius never stays at Capua when Eome itself is within sight. He drives his fussy landladies distracted with anxieties about his candles, for he sits up to "hawful 'ours." He works in such a way that the skeleton in the corner has much ado to keep from bursting into open laughter, so forgetful is he of poor flesh and blood. He seldom goes to bed tiU three or later; and after his latest 94 Men op promise. theatre— for he is a great student of Shakspere -^he wiU produce ten or twelve clear, weU- d¥awn designs. To go to the theatre he vrill nilss his dinner, or anything but work. Grin, skeleton, grin; this is the way genliis cuts its own throat, with its short-sighted avarice of time due to sleep. Is' there an action we do that does not make' eithei^ our aittendant dfevU laugh or our guardiatfl arigel weep ? So let the ^keietori grin, he can do but' what God permits ; and, after all, it is not vrith marble statues the world is in these latter days much benefited, not with all this plastier academy work and daUy two-hours' life-study. Yes, this knowledge^ gleaned from Dr. Hunter's Anatbmlcal Lectures, Sandby's Architecture, and Eeynolds's Att Aphorismsj vriU all end in the dkrk pit and its smothering six feet of Eoman earth. 1783. — Deare has left Carter, and that di vinity of his youthful imagination has shrunk to very small dimensions; He comes now tb bring the genius woik, and tries to quibble' him out of odd guineas, at which genius fires up, finding it "of amazing advantage to keep PROCTER AND DEAEE. 95 up consequence," as i* keeps off " twopenny- halfpenny jobsi" Hes knows Garter must come to him, for nobody else can finish it in the same style ; so he boldly ups, and teUs Garter that unless he deals as a gentleman with him he will not work. He gets twenty-four guineas for a chimney-piece tablet, tries to save up to launch in larger* apartments, and almost suc ceeds in persuading the Prince of Wales to sit to him. The world knows no proof of genius superipr to that of making money. Deare does anything; models a Cupid for Mr. Cheere, the maker of leaden garden images, who lives next door to his old master, Carter; and, to crown aU, the great Mr. Bacon j, the sculptor, comes to him to model some figures for a monument, to be done at two guineas a-week, not tying himself down as to time. . The sculptori in this leaden age was still something of the tradesman, so you see he designed chimney-pieces, garden images, and figures for the pediments of country houses. Orders for aU these come in fast and three fold upon our friend Deare. He now charges sixty pounds for a mantel-piece, has modeUIng 96 MEN OP PROMISE. more than he can execute, and aU this time he Uves in a room so small and fuU of models, that gentlemen visitors must either stand or sit on the bed when they come to see his wonders. He models for the great lead-figure man in PiccadlUy; and even now, perhaps, in suburban gardens, Deare's Cupids gather mould and moss. « » * » « ROME. Deare at Eome turns marble into gold, hob nobs with dukes, copies the ApoUo for Lord Bervrick, and the Ariadne for an Irish banker's son. From a descendant of Penn alone, who takes him on a trip to Naples to see Vesuvius throw up fire, he gets 470/. worth of work. He buys a grey stallion, and rides out Uke a gentleman after working hours, when it gets too dark to chip at marble mouths and marble eyes. He learns the Italian airs of dancing, hires several marble cutters and a boy servant. Marble comes to him from Carrara, and he Is able to pay as much as 427 crowns for it at a time. To crown all, he marries a clever Uttle Eoman girl of humble birth, with whom he is happy. PROCTOR AND DEARE. 97 He is now a thriving man. He" writes to his brother Joseph that he has laboured like a giant for three years, and entreats him not to lose an hour in picking up inform9,tion ; en treats him not to stop tlU he is a leading man in his art, whatever It may be. He gets full, too, of dilettante gossip about Eome and its museums and gaUeries ; abont the Palatine Hill, now a vineyard ; and about the large and grand "Colosseum, or Amphitheatre of Titus," which he innocently describes as one might now do Tadmor, or some temple of Central America. He prefers St. Paul's to St. Peter's, but is In terested at the tomb of " the late Pretender's " wife, the daughter of Sobieski ; and he , men tions, as news, that, just before he wrote, the Duchess of Albany, an amiable woman, the Pretender's natural daughter, had died at Bo logna of abscess — so there remained of the Stuarts only the Cardinal York, an old man and a bigot, who lived like a sovereign. In the midst of all this hope and perform ance. Death comes to the door of the man of promise's studio, and gives his order among the rest. Deare must leave his chisel, and Ue TOL, II, H 98 MEN OP PROMISE. under a stone carved by another. On August 17, 1798, Deare dies of bilious fever, after ten days' illness. His friend Grignon writes a. business letter to the poor father in Englapd, , sending . him an authority to sign, in order that Signor Antonio Leonetti, an advocate, "who has a very extensive acquaintance among the, English of the best fashion who visit Eome, and is unlversaUy known for a man of abilities and integrity," may prevent the dispersion of the man of promisees effects among the poor relations of Deare's Italian vrife. The lively, generous, choleric man of pro mise now sleeps near the Pyramid outside the walls of Eome. Let us fling dovsTi our handful of valedic tory dust on the two men of promise, deriving some small lesson of humility from our glance into those quiet and forgotten graves — a warn ing that we in our pride of strength and flush of hope wiU do good not to neglect. Let us not repine at the great dark hand that sometimes comes out from behind the curtain, and removes the crowning pieces from the chess-board of life : that hand cannot move PROCTOR AND DEARE. 99 without God's wiU. Life begins, but does not end on earth. From great miseries, from stiU more fatal and hopeless non-performance, may those men of promise have been withdrawn. As struggUng men ourselves, as men not al ways triumphant in the struggle, let us look aside with pity for one moment as a fore- rank man faUs ; and hereafter, when we pass over the battle-field, let us stop to pluck one weed, at least, from : the ,: graves of two ioT- gottea. Men of Pjxomise. : h2 100 CHAPTEE V. VO;ST, the MONARCH OP MEDIOCRITY, IN NEWMAN STREET. Hazlitt, in his delightful " Table Talk," having brought up from the grave his old friend North cote, with the Devonshire tongue and Titian face, goes on to sketch little leonine Fuseli, with his keen transparent blue eye, and feU of white hair,' painting straddling giants with rope muscles and stone eyeballs in tin sockets. Then — touch ing for a moment upon old, jaunty, gay Cosway, "the little withered elderly gentleman," who, sitting to let his black servant lace his half-boots, looked like Venus being attired by the Graces — the charming essayist proceeds to shew us Mr. President West, "a small thin old man, with west in NEWMAN STREET. 101 regular, weU-formed features, and a precise, sedate, self-satisfied air" — a thoroughly me chanical, commonplace, and academic person. An easy first in America, sectarianly self- sufficient, favoured by kings, he felt that, except perhaps Napoleon, no one in the world could be named in the same breath. Gifted by nature vrith a dull, careful, but tame and feeble mind, West foUowed rules and receipts : and when he painted a picture, thought It was perfect — no doubt that it was not ever dared to profane his mind. He looked on himself as' a sacred being, and the founder of English Art ; he used to talk of Eeynolds's mistakes, and would describe the laws of colour that he discovered in Eaphael's cartoons. Like small men generally, he had no misgivings about his theories. He knew only the rules of Art, and following these, he believed himself to be infallibly right; he had no more doubt of what he did than the carpenter has that the plumb-line is straight, Leslie describes West as diffident, and blushing like a young girl at one of his insufficient lec tures. Men of boundless conceit are often difli- dent when they attempt an unaccustomed thing. 102 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. In the very lecture at which he blushed, he did not blush to say that he had discovered the final theory of colour — though Titian's "Peter the Martyr " violated all its rules — and coolly gave it to the students as you would give a receipt for brandy pudding. When he walked through his gaUery in New man Street, his fifty years' labour on either side staring vacantly and inanely ai hirii. West, says Hazlitt, saw nothing " to be added or taken away." He called his " St. Paul shaking off the Serpent " — " a little burst of genius, sir ; " and before a rosy blUowirig Eubens said, "What a pity this man wanted expression ! " Enviable old man, his conceit has something in it of genius; West saw nothing beyond himself; he measured the number of heads, he brought in his brown man, he counted his ribs ; he divided his three groups, he put his warin colours where the light entered, and his cold where the chief white was ; he attended to Le Brun, and elevated and lowered his eyebrows at the proper time, and was smiling and happy. An old dear friend of mine (Leigh, of Newnjan Street) remembered seeing the old man in his WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 10 gallery — since an Irvlngite chapel and a dancing-room — sitting quietly waitlag for the fiery chariot and the convoy of angels — calmly certain of Immortality. Yet it was a good, harm less old man; not energetically good, but still harmless — Gloved by at least Eobert Brenning, his faithful servant, and kind to young and poor artists, to whom (to their wondrous Injury) his morning doors were never shut. He had his pangs, too, when the Eegent neglected him, and stopped the comriiissions the unartistic old king had given this Quaker painter. " Put not your trust in Princes," depend upon it, has been sighed in Newman Street with as much sincerity as David ever uttered it when he was being hunted like a par tridge on the mountains. When a witty and acute writer (Mr. C, ColUns) laughs good-hu mouredly at the lavish benevolence with which people leave their pictures by West to the nation, remember, that West did good to English Art by encouraging the large historic style. The old pig-headed painter, sitting in his gaUery in Newman Street, calmly waiting for Death to bring to him the crown of immortality. 104 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. was an Incarnation of vanity almost sublime in his self-confidence. Can we wonder at his vanity, when we re member that his life was one unbroken series of successes. He was a Quaker, yet a courtier — a republican by birth, yet a friend and copi- panlon of kings — a commonplace man, yet attaining the highest rank In his profession. When genius was starving, he was thriving ; Whoever rose or fell. West was loaded with commissions ; whoever was in or out, West had his band of patrons, eager to outdo the king in loading him with commissions. If ever a lucky star shone In the heavens, it shone out that hour that West, the Quaker painter, was born to adorn the world with four hundred feeble pictures. Let us retrace the life of the successful, dull man, and discuss his claims to that oblivion that has already blotted out so many of his pictures. He was of a Buckinghamshire stock, and one of his ancestors had ridden side by side with sturdy Hampden. It was even said by courtly heralds that, going further back, you found the Quaker's ancestry centred in a Lord WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 105 Delaware who fought under the Black Prince. « Later, the family turned Quakers, and early in Charles II.'s time emigrated to America, where the head of the family married a daughter of one of Penn's chief councillors, and on his raarriage set the example of releasing his negro slave, as an example to the colony. Benjamin, "the youngest wren of nine," was born somewhat prematurely after a camp meeting, where a denunclating preacher had predicted the curses of God on France for her licentiousness, and on England for her avarice. The preacher at the mother's bed-side predicted the son's greatness, having never before pro duced such a result by a sermon ; and at seven years old he was found drawing, in red and black Ink, a portrait of his sister's child, that he had been asked to watch with a fly-flap while her mother gathered flowers. A year later, a party of Indians stopping at his father's house taught him the use of the bow, and gave him their war-paint to colour his sketches of birds and flowers ; his brushes he made from hair stolen from his father's cat. Having paint and canvas given him, he hid himself for 106 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. several days, re-arrariging pictrites from some of Grawlirig's engravings. The praise of a painter named WiUiams, and the present of Richardson's and Du Fresnoy's Works, made him decide at nine years of age upon being a painter. His ambition begari to show itself; he declared to every one he would be a painter, and refused to ride with a boy who announced his intention of becomirig a tailor. His drawing set aU the boys in Springfield drawing, and the neighbours began now to buy young West's drawings on boards. At fifteen, a governess at a gentleman's house where he was on a visit read to hini some of the Greek and Roman poets, and set his imagiriation working. A lawyer's beautiful wife sat to him for a portrait, and for a friendly gun smith he painted a picture of the "Death of- Socrates ; " but all this time his education stood StUl, and to the end of his life, even when venerable President of the Academy, and the favourite of kings, he was always shaUow in information, and very uncertain in his spelling. The time had now come when the boy's profession must be fixed on — momentous mo- WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 107 ment of boy-life ! Painting had hitherto been ignored by the commercial, unimaginative sect. It was doubtful what the Friends would say to the young enthusiast's choice ; but suddenly, one John WilUamson got up and proposed that they should agree to "sanction the Art, and encourage the youth ; " God had conferred remarkable mental gifts on the boy, and those gifts could be bestowed but for a wise and good purpose. The boy is called in, and stands in the middle of the room between his delighted father and mother. A womari speaks next, and says that their sect had hitherto excluded painting because it had been misused and employed only to minister to man's sensual gratification ; they hoped that in the boy's hands it might display a lofty sentiment and devout dignity, " worthy of the contemplation of Christians.'' The moral purpose, we must own, was, always strong in West, and In that respect he contrasts well with Reynolds, whP, with ten times his talent, was rather purposeless. Suddenly, from some momentary impulse, which no cold Quakery hand restrained. West 108 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. became joined to the troops of General Forbes, and accompanied the expedition sent to search for the remains of Braddock's army, that the Indians had cut to pieces in the woods. West was with Major Sir Peter Halket, some officers of the old Highland Watch, and some native scouts. They found the bones of the fallen men under the trees of a long gloomy vaUey, or by the side of the ashes of the Indian camp- fires. Under one of the trees, a scout pointed out where Halket's father and brother fell, and, removing the leaves, discovered their skeletons. Halket recognised his father's skuU by an artificial tooth, and fainted in the arms of the soldiers. A grave was dug, and the bones, swathed in a Highland plaid, were buried. Years after. West would have painted a picture of that pathetic scene, but Lord Grosvenor dis suaded him ; it no doubt, however, furnished him with suggestions for his best picture — " The Death of Wolfe," Recalled home to receive the last dying blessing pf the mother he loved so much. West now left his father's house, and set up as por trait-painter at Philadelphia, where he charged WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 109 two guineas and a half for a head, and five guineas for a, half length. He now determined to visit Italy, and, to coUect funds for this object, visited New Yorkj where he met with generous supporters, and at once raised his prices. He had a free passage to Leghorn given him by a flour merchant, fifty pounds to pay expenses, and numerous valuable letters of introduction. He entered Rome on a July morning, 1760. The first American who had come to the Eternal City to study Art became at once a lion. He was looked upon as a savage-^as one of Jean Jacques Roussseau's pure minds, which are useful, as children's wit, to trace, the origin of metaphysical impressions in. Blind Cardinal Albani, a great judge of intaglios, which he examined by touch, asked eagerly if he was black or white; and thirty carrlagefuls of diletr tanti accompanied the young Quaker to ¦ the Vatican, to see what effect the ApOllo would have on him. Great was the company of "the preachers" — wigs shook down powder on the Vatican stones — sacques swept the avenues of St. Peter. At a signal, the doors that hid 110 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. the ApoUo were thrown open. Would he swoon, or would he dance for joy? No! he calmly exclaimed, "My God, a young Mohawk war rior." At first there was a buzz of annoyance at the humiliating comparison; but when the Quaker told them how he had seen his Mo hawk friends standing in the same attitude watching the flight of. their arrows, they de clared it was the best criticism ever pro nounced — and from that -moment West had it aU his own way. He was the King of the Lions. Everything he did now served only to make him more popular; a picture hung. by him ano nymously in Crespigni's gallery, was by Dance mistaken for Mengs, though the colour was superior. On Crespigni pointing out the young artist, sitting restless and agitated, waiting for their verdict, they ran and shook him by the hand, while the Italians embraced him. Mengs praised him, and advised him to travel; but a fever arising from mental anxiety coming on, kept him eleven months at Leghorn. When he recovered, and prepared to com plete his Art tour, he found that rumours of WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. Ill his success had reached Philadelphia, and that his kind friend the flour merchant had ordered the bank to give him unliinited credit. Egregious vanity, subUme from the very , un consciousness of the man, was always breaking out in West. He shed tears once when a rascally guitar player improvised some verses at a Roman coffee-house, in which he predicted the transfer of Art, through West, from the old to the new world. The doggerel, no doubt, was prophetical — but of the future Evangel, West certainly never wUl be the prophet. One of his great dictums about Rome in after-life was that Michael Angelo never gave " a prob able character to his works," but he called Ra phael, daily, more " interesting, natural, and noble." The great man could afford to pat Raphael on the head, and to snub Buonarotti. Everywhere honours and success. Parma, Bo logna, and Florence elect him into their aca demies. At Parma, the reigning prince gives him an audience, and in France he stops to prophesy revolution. A member of I do not know how many foreign academies, the Uon of Rpme, the pet 112 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. of cardinals, the talented Quaker, who had dared to appear at the court of the Princes of Parma with his hat on, retumed to London in 1763, to tarry a short time, and then fly home to his father's land. This clever mediocrity came at a time peculiarly favourable to mediocrity, that acknowledged no difficulties in Art, and had so many claims to pubUc notice: Ho garth was failing, and his mind was on th' lees; Reynolds had given up the dreams of high Art for the ,solId advaritage of portrait painting; Wilson was despised, and taking to that false friend — brandy, the true aqiCa, mortis ; Gainsborough sought fairie in landscapes, which would not sell; Barry was fretting and copy ing at Rome; and West, with aU his mediocrity, could see this, and he at once took rooms in Bed ford Street, Covent-garden, got introductions, to Wilson the neglected and Reynolds the prosper ous, and set to work as a professed historical painter, without competitors. The course was there for him to trot over ; the turf was green, fresh, and without a hoof-print. His " Angelica and Medora," his " Simon and Iphigenia," and a portrait of " General Monkton," Wolfe's right hand WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 113 at the battle of Quebec, were aU " sweet poison for the age's tooth." Johnson and Burke approved his works, and the oracle of the clubs, though purbUnd, had a voice as eloquent to lead otner men as Burke's. His clear,' shaUow,^ duU colour was new to those days of dark pictures ; aboVe all, his quiet, religiousj and classic subjects won the the church and the university. Every day was a Step onwards. There were fresh rumours every jday of his successes — now he was painting the touching scene of "The Parting of Hector and Andromache," for Dr. Newton; now the "Return of the Prodigal Son," for the Bishop of Worces ter ; and he had refused 1001. a year to go down and decorate Lord Rockingham's country man sion in Yorkshire. Cold, prudent, and industrious, such a man as West could not fail to get on. With the true calmness of his nature. West yielded to the persuasions of his friends, and con trived that his intended bride should come to hini from PhUadelphia, instead of leaving his easel to fetch her. She came, and they were mar ried at St. Martlri's-In-the-Fields, gravely and calmly as Quakers should be, with no outburst of , VOL. II. I 114 WEST m NEWMAN STREET. intemperate joy, and no visible demonstration of feeling. But the great instrument of West's success was his zealous friend. Dr. Drummond, Archbishop of York. West listened patiently to his powerful patron, and painted for him, from a passage in Tacitus, "Agrippina landing vrith the ashes of Germanicus." The archbishop, flattered by the prudent painter's alacrity, never rested in trying to benefit the young Quaker. He tried labo riously, but in vain, to raise for him 3,000Z., to enable him to give up portrait and take entirely to historical painting. He teased the Duke of Portland and worried Lord Rockingham; he even obtained an audience of the young king, and told him of the genius of the devout young Ameri can. The royal mandate at last went forth: "Let me see this young painter of yours, vrith his * Agrippina,' as soon as yon please." Before the archbishop could reach West's house a lady of the Court, with the mystery of an old sibyl, had brought the painter the news, though vrithout disclosing her name. Before the door had weU shut after this fair avant-cowrier of good fortune, an officer of the palace arrived to summon WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 115 West with his " Agrippina " to the palace. The courtier told him the not very wise king was frank and candid, and of great purity and good ness ; and the impression these . words made on the delighted Quaker began a forty years' friend ship between the king and the lucky artist. The " Agrippina " was admired. The king pro posed " a noble Eoman subject — the departure of Eegulus from Eome." The painter said it was a magnificent subject. The flattered king, won, as the archbishop had been, at once ordered it. The king helped to put the picture on the easel, and ordered the attendants out bf the room. He would have read the Eegulus scene from Livy, had not that book of the history been lost. With the man of tact everything goes well, while Wil son pines in a garret and Barry is working at gra tuitous pictures — ^is training for starvation. At this crisis of success, various auxiliary circum stances concurred to help him on the right road. He became renowned on the Serpentine for his skating ; and Colonel Howe, who had witnessed his skUl in Arnerica, brought aU the beau monde to witness his performance. These admirers, by an easy transition, passed from admirers into pa- l2 116 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. trons and sitters : everywhere iri this man's life quiet tact was the lodestar of success. Even from quarrels of artists he obtained some beneflt. West and Eeynolds retired from the Society of Incorporated Artists, who had fallen out about the mode In which their exhibition pro fits should be spent. The sciulptoirs said. Buy sculpture — 'the artists. Collect pictures — the rich neutrals, Put the money in the funds, and let it grow, sir,, grow. Quietly, velvet-fiDoted, after his manner. West got the ear of the king. He 'flattered the weak/ good, shallow man by encouraging ;him, to draw up some plans for a new associaticin, although he had, given his pledge to the, old society, whose manager, Kirby, had taught the young king per spective. Kirby, in his inaugural speech, assured his colleagues of the king's indifference to the seceders. He little knew the thunderbolt that was forging for him by the quiet, smooth-tongued, respectable Intriguer. One day West is painting on "Eegulus," the king and queen looking on, smiling their royal approval. Mr. Kirby ip announced. There are whispers in German, and Mr. Kirby WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 117 IS admitted, arid intrPduced to the young American. Kirby, half-alarmed, and affecting an air of patrPri'age and indiffererfce, turned tb the king, and said, "Why,. your Majesty never mentioned this work to me. Who made the frame?. It is not made by your Majesty's workmen ; It ought to have been' made by the royal "carver and gUder." Calmly arid coldly, as royalty^ when below freezing point, can be, the King repUed^ "Kirby, wheriever 'you are able to paint such a picture as this, your friend ^hall make the frame." Kirby gets redder and more alarmed ; he must try concUIatibn. ^'1 hope, Mr. West, that you intend to exhibit this picture ? " What a smUe expands the riibuth arid widens the eyes of Kirby ! Says West, scarcely looking from his pic ture, "It is painted for the palace, and the exhibition must depend upon His Majesty's pleasure." Both Kirby and West mean what they say, not for each other, but for the* King. The 118 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. king breaks in here, and says, "Assuredly I shall be very happy to let the work be shown to the public." Kirby is now getting into smoother water ; he presses his advantage by continuing the flattery. "Then, Mr. West, you wIU send it to my exhibition?" Miserable man ! now comes your c(ywp de grace, as the king sternly answers for his silent protegS, " No ; it must go to my exhi bition — to the Eoyal Academy." Kirby bowed and retired ; and when he died shortly after no one could decide whether he died of old age or of mortification and broken heart. When the Eoyal Academy opened at Somerset House, West's "Eegulus" was the sun of the room. West being now the first English historical painter, began to sweep away some of the conventions of the art he had embraced, and in doing that was the chief good he ever did. In his " Death of Wolfe," bought by Lord Gros venor, he abandoned classic dress, and clothed the Indians and soldiers daringly in the cos tume of his own time. The opposition at first WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 119 was alarming, but common sense prevailed. The king refused to purchase, and Eeynolds and the Archbishop of York came to entreat. him not to mn any risk of losing the pubUc he had just begun to win. What Kemble did years after for the stage. West did now for Art. He silenced Eeynolds by the simple but obvious argument — America was unknown to Greece and Eome, and the costume was obso lete. The classic dress, he confessed, was pic turesque, but to introduce it would be to gain in grace and lose in sentiment. He wanted to paint truth, not fiction, and to mark the place, time, and people. They went away and returned again. Eeynolds, after half-an-hour's thought before the canvas, rose and said, " West has con quered ; this picture will occasion a revolution in Art ! " At this time he was not so jealous of West as he afterwards became. West was now famous, and the royal com mission kept him in incessant work. You may still see the dreary pictures of the mediocre man in the quiet rooms at Hampton Court, 120 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. where they rest as in alms-houses,, old, invsilided, and now almost forgotten candidates for im mortality. There is Epaminondas dying, and the Chevalier Bayard, in grievously inaccurate costume, foUowirig suit, and Cyrus Uberating the king of Armenia's famUy, and Legestus and his daughter (rather Guelphic in face) being brought before Germanicus. West was always at the royal ear, to flatter and propitiate ; and when the kirig grew tired of the Iliad, he. painted subjects from English history and the Bible. He was always quietly stimulating his royal patron to fresh orders, and persriading him that the suggestions arose in his own naind. When the king grew tired of the classics. West lamented that the ItaUans, in painting perpetually the miracles arid triumphs of saints, had neglected their national histpryi Thie king instantly proposed that West should decPrate St. George's HaU, Windsor, with seven scenes from Froissart, They, are such weak vapidities, that the tamest eclectic of the Caracci school would have disdained to produce them. But the colour is clear, and reasonably pure; and they WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 121 are full of West's calm, dull self-confidence, and at best are only fit for an hotel or a concert-room. O tact, tact ! — thy worldly triumphs are greater than, those of genius ! Weary of Froissart and the posture-making knight. West proposed "to the king to decorate his chapel with a series of pictures showing the Progress of Eevealed EeUgioUi The kingj . flattered by the disinterested fidelity of his American painter, consented to consult a coun^ cil of bishops as to whether it was right for Protestants to introduce reUgious paintings into their churches. The , king remembered the Ee- formers' horror of paintings and the Puritans' dislike.— the subject was a debatable one then^ as it is now. But when kings ask advice, they ask only to get confirmation of, their own opinions ; the bishops answered as the king wished. Bishop Hurd, as their spokesman, said, that " They had examined Mr. West's thirty-five subjects, and that not one of them but might be treated in a way that even a Quaker might contemplate with edification." . , The king was offended ; for it is said in youth 122 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET, he fell in love vvith a Quaker girl (Hannah Lightfoot), and he loved West because he was of the same sect. The king repUed tartly to the bowirig bishop, " The Quakers are a body of Christians for whom I have a high respect ; I love their peacefiil tenets, and their benevo lence to one another ; and but for the obUgations of birth, I would be a Quaker." The snubbed bishop bowed, as Kirby had done before, and retired. The painter-courtier, smooth, quiet, proUficj went to work at the series of thirty-six Scripture pifctures, as he would have done to decorate St. Paul's, or adorn all the palaces of England with frescoes ; calmly, confidently, duUy, he went to work — finally achiering twenty-eight out of the series, and netting twenty-one thou sand seven hundred pounds; no bad reward for mediocrity. What Leonardo, and Eaphael, and Michael Angelo had done, he did with all the tameness of Carlo Dolce, and the tedious equality of Guido's old age ; and to the great works and great profits we must add rich frames of royal portraits, for which he received two thousand guineas. WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 123 Even the American war only rooted West deeper in the favour of the king ; for he became the royal gossip, and the chief source of informal tion as to the character and doings of Washington and his brave colleagues. He told his stories of his Indian masters in painting, and of the finding the Halkets' bones, I have no doubt, till every footman In the palace knew them by heart. West, who considered him self favoured by, heaven, beUeved that his com munications were of the deepest importance to the king, and began to think himself a privy-coun- clUor all but in name. Can we wonder that on Eeynolds's death West succeeded him as President of the Eoyal Academy, and that tame lectures, stuffed with flowery truisms, were applauded by lads who really considered their president, as Fuseli did, an old woman I Weak, cold common- sense is but heavy porridge for the young mind; but the students were dazzled by his court influence — and, luckily for West, attend ance is all but compulsory at academic lec tures. SteadUy, nnmffled went on West, with his 124 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. cold dignity, his commendable industry, his diploriiatic reserve, and his ungenerous, reSpect-' able coldness, safe and prudent to the last; It was thought wonderful of the great man to attend Gainsborough's funeral; arid that such attendance should be thpught wonderful proves him cold and Selfish, for he was neither poot nor unknown; arid by the side of a friend's grave one's own small ambitions appear but trivial things at the best. Barry might starve iri his Castle Street den; Wilson die broken hearted; Procter and Deare perish in thei* prime : nothing rtiffled the calm serenity of West's vanity. Silent, easy, grave, and sedate, he waited for the certain immortaUty, and walked his gal lery as If the halo were already luminous' round his brow: a Uring statue, he moved about im perturbable and content. JostUng nobody, yet fenced in from aU rivalry, his life moved on calmly as a summer's day. From Newman Street to Windsor and back he glided — a saintly courtiery moving in a frozen atmosphere no accident could thaw. A fiatterer and a friend of the king's youth, he was fixed immo vably in royal favour. TVEST IN NEWMAN STREET, 125 , There is every reason to suppose that West, like Haydon, might >h!9,ve succeeded' had he lowered his ambition. In simple g'en'ne sXibjeots West might : have left, a pernianent name. LesUe speaks highly ,pf the picture pf his &mUy, which he had seen when a boy. in a print-shop window in PhUadelphia. He eaUs it the most original of his works — which is not saying much — and praises its. nature and simpUcity. Everything in it is indiridual, cha racteristic, '. and essential ; its masses of Ught and dark are broad and strong. Aftferwards he painted too fast — away from nature — on subjects his imagiriation could not reproduce ; and he spoiled, everything by throwing; over it the sham classical wet blanket. The picture represents the Quaker relatives paying their first visit to Mrs, West after the birth of her chUd, John West and his eldest son keep on their hats. They are all sitting In sUent medi tation for a moment, tiU the old man shaU rise, remove his hat, and offer up a prayer for the mother and infant. A gentle flatterer. West knew weU how to propitiate foolish and great people, even though they might be kings. Even 126 WEST IN NEWMAN street. when he had introduced that great reform into English Art — the introduction of modern cos tume into historical pictures — when Eeynolds and the archbishop were all running about aghast, and asking each other's opinion. West was wise enough to let the king question West about his artistic schism. West's answers were mere common sense, and what every one now thinks, but In that conventional age they were vrisdom. The Quaker painter contended that the dress was true aud marked the time — that without this a century hence the work would be treated as a mere dream and fiction. Eeynolds sat half-an-hour looking, then con fessed himself conquered, and declared there would be a revolution in Art. We may laugh at aU this, but we must re member that though vrigs were foolish things, he was a brave, wise man who dared first burn his wig and wear his own hair, and deserves a statue in the Abbey as much as half of them. King George, repenting too late, bought a copy of the picture that Lord Grosvenor had pur chased. He fiUed his palaces with West's mb- bish. West Ustened to aU the fancies, of his WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 127 royal patron, and painted every one tamely, coldly, and with the same dull faces and in correct costume. He painted dead Epaminondas, Bayard, Cyrus, because the king remembered them from his school-day reading ; and when he painted Legestus before Germanicus he took care to introduce likenesses of the royal family, careless of the envy of Eeynolds's friends at the Quaker's monopoly of royal patronage. Like a facile house-painter. West was always ready for anything : he painted aU through Froissart to adorn St. George's HaU with Edward III.'s victory, though of all men in the world West was the least impulsive and the least chivalrous. When the king ceased to be warlike West changed too, and became reUgious. He amused the king as projecting buUders do some men — humoured his slightest fancy, and made him pleased at believing he had a taste. The con scientious king, with the aid of a councU of bishops, decided that it was not dangerous to Protestantism to adorn his chapel with West's religious pictures. The Quaker, flying at aU game, instantly, vrith cold haste, sketched out 128 WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. his subjects, executing almost as rapidly as he sketched. Entering boldly into the list with the old masters, netting largely, as has been seen, by the transaction, he waved his brush, and, as though it had been a Prospero wand, there f eU a shower of gold. Art, after aU, was an expensive hobby of the poor king, and somewhat (con sidering West's talerit) a proof of incipient in sanity. While Barry and .WUson wrangled and starved. West was a rich Sir Oracle, the friend of princes, the man whom vthe world delighted unjustly to honour ; though aU the time, as even his obliged friend Haydon ferociously yet truly said: "In drawing his style was bfeg-' garly, skinny, and mean ; his light and shadow scattered, his colour brick-dust, his women without beauty — not one single picture to de light the taste, imaginatibn, or the heart : the block machine at Portsmouth could be taught to paint as weU." Even during the American war West con trived to persuade the king that he could give him valuable information ; and when, on the death of Eeynolds, he hecdme president, it seemed with the Art world an undisputed WEST IN NEWMAN STREET. 129 matter of course. His lectures were tame and insipid as his pictures. He remained after, as before his dignity, meek, yet dignified, unob- tmsive, yet good-naturedly self-satisfied. Every day up early, work from ten tiU four; dress, dine, see visitors, and work again. Such was the even traiour of the self- deceived old man's way. I sometimes indeed think that West's pride was scarcely inferior to his self-conceit, for he refused knighthood from the king, thinking "a more permanent title " more desirable. When the dark veU feU over the king, a cloud feU suddenly on Westfs fortune. It was like an axe faUing on bis neck. His income ceased, his pictures were stopped— all owing, he thought, to Queen Charlotte's anger at his visiting Napoleon in 1802, or, as some persons hinted, to the vrish to make up the Duke of York's income. These suspensions, however, were after many relapses and returns of income. In vain . the Nestor of Art sent to say that the suspension of his work would injure the national Art; the patronage never returned again in fuU blow. Things went badly with West after this. Neither Fox, Pitt, VOL. II. K 130 WEST IN NEVVMAN STREET. nor Percival redeemed their promises of aiding an Art-association West wished to found. The times were too busy to think of Art. Perpetually opposed at the Academy by Lee, West retired, and gave way to Wyatt, the architect, though he was afterwards re-elected. Yet stIU the old man remained bland, unruffled, self-satisfied ; and, painting his " Christ HeaUng the Sick," received three thousand guineas for it from the British Institution. A copy of It he sent to PhUadelphia to adorn a hospital, after its exhibition had helped to coUect funds for its erection. On he went painting large unsalable pictures, tUl one day Death entered the studio, and called the old man gently from his peaceful art, where he had long been waiting the summons. He went, as he believed, to be a crowned demi-god of Art ; but his first step was into the darkness of obUvion. 131 CHAPTEE VI. STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. It Is hard to see the old man in the boy — ^to iden- tifyin the portrait ofthe sage the likeness ofthe boy one went to school with, and beat at marbles. Growth, looked at in this way, seems Uke en chantment, and what is merely proper seems one of Time's miracles. In the portrait of Stothard, deep-browedj abstract, benevolent, and musing, it is difficult to recognize the sickly chUd of the Yorkshire inn keeper, dra,wing a little black man on the waU of his father's house in Long Acre: yet this quiet dreamer, fuU of years and honours, is that sickly boy sent to the good old dame who kept a school near York, to grow stronger and to k2 132 STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. learn his letters. It was here that some heads by Houbraten and the blind Belisarius, engraved by Strange, fired his impressible mind, and made him an artist. It was at the little cottage at Accomb that his greatest pleasure was to be allowed to sit in the long store-room of the old dame, and spend hours in studying the old picture that hung there. Years after his clever bio grapher supposes that the recollections of this residence were revived for his iUustrations to Shenstone's "Schoolmistress," which is full ofthe artist's quiet grace and sense of beauty. There is the old d&me, grave and kindly, her simple cap and plain kerchief cjosbed over her bosom,, the " bod ing tremblers," in qualat coat and knee-breeches, sit near the open door, through which tree boughs wave pleasantly — the distaff, the ready birchj the high-backed chair, are all remembered. Kind old aunt at Stretton— a bitter dose of school at Tadcaster — ^half^starved at an Essex school, where he was taught to dance by Gri- maldl— theri home to console his poor mother, who had gone to live at Stepney, having lost her hugband while out angling. Now, what to do with the boy Thomas, thirteen STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. l33 years old? He must draw, and is therefore ap prenticed to a designer of patterns for brocaded sUks — a craftsman who lived in Spital Square^ and ministered there to the fashions of a frivolous age, if ever an age was frivolous. Having enough of sUk flowers in the day-time, Stothard devoted his nights to designing from the " Biad " and the "Fairy Queen," and to devising Indian-ink battle-pieces, after the wild manner of Mortimer, much to the delight of his iriaster, who wisely encouraged these dawning and am bitious efforts. But master dies, and sUk bro cades go out, of fashion, and Stothard has more time to himself and his own fair fancies, though he is a good lad, and so sweet-tempered and - steady that everyone loves him, and he is all-in- all to the poor struggling widow. The chance hanging up of some of the lad's best drawings over the mantel-piece in the best parlour was the turning-point of Stoth ard's Ufe. Mr. Harrison, the editor of the " Novelist's Magazine," calling to give an order sees the dravrings, and engages the clever, bashful boy to work for him, giving him as earnest-money the sweetest half-guinea he ever 134 STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. earned ; working in company with Shelly, a young miniature-painter, and Mr. Scarlett, a clever young clerk — taking lodgings with the former in the Strand, after a short tour in Wales. Now really an artist, and getting a guinea for a book illustration — now cutting out some footholds for the climb upwards, the young aspirant enters himself at Maiden Lane, where Moser and Wilson are Ubrarians, sends a "Holy Family" to the Society of Artists, has kind advice from bland Sir Joshua, and mixes vrith the bag, wigs, and swords, sacques, and short sleeves that attend the 1780 Eoyal Academy Exhibition. He studies Albert Durer, and establishes a method of pen-and-ink dravring, from the living model, which orthodox men rather groan at. It is founded on his dread of the dead lay figure, and his disbelief that momentary action can be weU learnt from the fixed, relaxed posi tions of a hired model. He therefore learns in about an hour to draw a pen-and-ink outline of a statue, and then moved to a fresh posi tion, beUeving that tmth, care, and a good STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL, 135 flovring Une, were best learnt by using a ma terial that would not rub out. Stothard's leisure time, when the Academy closed, was devoted to riding tours in Wales, and sketching cataracts, castles, and glens, as backgrounds for future pictures. It was in a sketching tour up the Medway that, near Upnor Castle, Stothard and his friends, Blake and Ogleby, were seized as French spies, and retained under a river-side tent, till letters proring their innocence could be received from London. About this time Stothard married the daugh ter of an Anabaptist. It is a striking Instance of the tranquil equanimity of the artist's mind, that after his wedding he went as usual to the antique room at the Eoyal Academyj to draw till it closes at three, when he calnily mentioned his marriage, and asked a fellow- student, who sat next him, home to dinner. Neither George the Third, or that king of dilettantes. Sir George Beaumont, ever patron ized Stothard; but still quietly he toiled on, became an Associate in 1792, and the same year exhibited his graceful picture of " Con- 136 STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. firmation," Ulustrated " Paradise Lost," threw up Mortimer as a model, and tried to catch something of the suavity and spring sunshine of Eaphael's youth and goodness. Removing vrith his grovring family from Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, Stothard now moved to New man Street, where West the painter, and Bacon the sculptor,^ Uved, and where soon after Rus seU, Ward, Howard, Jackson, and Dawe, also resided. The chief events oS the painter's quiet life at this period of it were the loss of his family plate by a robbery, his becoming an R. A., his beginning to iUustrate the " Pil grim's Progress," and the painting the grand stair-case at Burleigh, for which he received a thousand guineas. His letters to his wife during this task of four summers are fuU of a gentle love and solicitude; and amid aU this time of toil and thought, we must Imagine the brave man working hard, at extra times, at aU sorts of humble work, drawing for pocket- books, ladies' fashions, court-baUs, royal hunt ings, transparencies, magazines, play-books — aU executed vrith as much skUl and care as if STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. 137 each had brought him in a fortune, or was the crowning work of his ambition. In 1809 Stothard went to Scotland to make dravrings for his designs for Constable's edition of Bums, and about the same time went to Haford to decorate Col. Johnson's library with illustrations from Froissart and Monstrelet, which the Colonel had translated. Unhappy home ! — a few years, and the Colonel, his vrife, and daughter were aU dead, and the first mansion burnt down, the second one bought by the Duke of Newcastle, and Stothard's drawings sold in London by auction. With his pupils, whether Miss Johnes or Miss Markham, the daughter of the archdeacon of York, Stothard was always the kind, patient instructor, and recommended incessant copying in line from Raphael and the sketching from real woollen drapery, which is always large and generous in its foldings and faUings. Stothard was one of the most amiable pf men, and he painted the tender, the peaceful, and the beautiful of that lovely inner, unlost Paradise of a world which he kept treasured in his ovm pure heart. He longed for the better world to which he has 138 STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. gone, and which, whUe living, he tried to realize — with stammering hand, yet with a deUghtful ndiveti quite his own. He lived In a sacred, holy elyslum, of which he kept the key, and he died leaving it hermetically sealed up. Serene amid misfortunes most crushing, he found comfort in his gentle art. Even the con demnations of Sir George Beaumont, the neglect of the aristocracy, Stothard bore, like Turner, with the patience of tme genius, that knows it has a golden future before it. Leslie, In his pleasant post-morfem autobio graphy (edited by Mr. Tom Taylor, the ad mirable editor of Haydori's life), gives us a good sketch of Stothard's manners; he teUs us he drew chance objects from Inn windows — what long country walks he took — ^how Tumer loved his work, and caUed him " the Giott of England" — ^how he tied a pencU to his finger, and drew from the post-chaise aU the apple-trees that Une the Amiens road — ^how he drew academy life studies at once (to make him think) with pen and Ink — how he walked the streets looking for subjects for the "Novelist Magazine" — ^how he and Constable went out (1824) pic-nicking to Ooombe STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. 139 Wood — and how he was so hardy and thrifty that he never wore a great-coat, or entered a hackney coach, in his Ufe — how Flaxman respected him, and used every year, on his birth-day, to present his wife vrith a picture of Stothard's — how at last he grew deaf and careless in dress, but stiU retained a venerable Homeric head. Lastly, how once, on a cold baUoting day at the Academy, when Sir Thomas said, " Who wiU bring Mr, Stothard's hat?" every boy ran to the door, and he was the lucky and the gaUantest who brought it before the puzded old Nestor knew what the bustle meant. But at the risk of arrest for robbery, I must quote two exquisitely naive stories of Leslie's, who wrote as well as painted. LesUe was praising the touching sentiment in a picture of his, representing a sailor taking leave of his sweetheart, "I am glad you Uke it, sir," said the dear,^simple-hearted old man, " it was painted vrith japanner's gold size," Again at the Coombe Wood pic-nic, where Constable had been crovring over him for his own providence in thinking of some means to temper the cold water of the spring, he lay back 140 STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. on the grass, and looking up at the Midsummer sun, staining with meUow gold the leafy vault above their heads, he said, " That's aU glaring, sir." In tbe ten thousand designs that Stothard left behind him, some are careless in drawing, many are incorrect in costume, but none are devoid of a certain sweet Raphaelesque beauty — grace and modesty stood ever smiUng near his easel. The lovely and the graceful he under stood, but the strong and dignified were not his ; he is sportive, elegantj, deUcate, sensitive, sunshiny, joyous, yet his peasants too often look to be ladies in disguise, and his colour is often too flimsy and sketchy, though occa sionaUy deep and strong as the Venetians. In his famUy Stothard was unhappy. His eldest boy, a fine manly feUow, was accidentally shot dead by a school-fellow ; the other, the gifted and amiable antiquarian artist, was killed by faUIng from a ladder while coping an old stained-glass window at Beer Ferrers, in Devon shire. Stothard's death was calm and happy; he died looking upwards, and holding his son's hand. STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. 141 Stothard was one of those happy souls whose Eves seem a foretaste of Heaven; to whom " AU the way To heaven was a summer's day;" who bear kiadly, like some gracious fruit, the sharp cold storms of early spring and the fierce mid-heat of summer, and iristead of cankering or blighting, or sowing under their infiuence, may ripen the faster for the hand of the great gatherer ia life's great garden — Death. I do not wish to arrogate for our calm, equable man a very high place in Art. He was but a mere tender-hearted and poetical Watteau: he drew too mudi; his graceful faciUty became a danger ; his world was a world of conventions ; but stiU we must aU admit it was a world of angels. I cannot speak very highly of his painting, though Turner admired it so much. It waa not soUd, it was not learned; It was a gay, playful style, unfettered by any severe laws of light and shade, form, or colour. It was a ran dom skirmishing, happy manner, that might have 142 STOTHARD THU GRACEFUL. been graceful for the amateur, but hardly be came the severe artist. There was a smUe of eternal youth about it, but it wanted the so briety and masslveness of the great Venetian masters. There was a little of the baUet-dance and second-hand Boccaccio about it, and a trifie of the elegant staircase painter of early Ufe. It has always seemed to me that Stothard was not vigorous, or dramatic, or passionate enough for our serious age. He would have been in the times of Louis XV. an exquisite house- decorator; an innocent, gentle enthusiast, who would have turned a Rococo Palace Into a very Arcadia. StiU, beside begging, half mad, Haydon, beside Barry, with his fumes, and pets, and rages — beside FuseU, with his dreamy bombast, Stothard ap pears Uke a good spirit come from some brighter spot than this dim earth, vrith its atmosphere of turmoil, its storms, and its too transitory sunshine. I close this insufficient chapter, headed vrith his name, with a pleasant sadness. I have no sense of charnel-house damps around me, no fume of the fresh grave, no breath of the new- STOTHARD THE GRACEFUL. 143 opened vault, no unwholesonae smeU of crape. and coffin; but no, instead, I feel transported to a bright open meadow, purple with April violets; and far above my head, blythe in the far-receding blue, I hear a lark, the favourite bird of the younger angels, rising, rising- and it seems to me as if it were the transformed soul of the dead artist. 144 CHAPTEE VIL MORLAND EST THE SPONGING HOUSE. I SEE, on the dirty pallet-bed of a loathsome sponging house in Air Street, Hatton Garden, a poor artist, burning vrith fever, and trying in vain to sleep. He groans and tosses from side to side — only stopping now and then to drink from that pewter tankard fuU of gin that is on a chair by the bedside, or to curse the old hag who, suffering herself nothing, preaches patience to the "dear creature," whose white poison she has already too deeply shared. What ghastly, lazar- house Ught comes through the heavUy-barred windows of that room ! Death's black hand is on that throat. Were that guttering candle, now a mere flaming welter of tallow, a Uttle more MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 145 steady in its light, you would see that the poor groaning wretch lying on the sponging-house bed is palsied In the left hand, and his short, heavy, pale features are bloated with habitual intem perance. He is alone and vrithout a friend, and is dying like a dog — the most miserable wretch on earth. Far away is his broken-hearted wife. He has sown the wind, and is reaping, as all such sowers must, the inevitable whirlwind. This is Morland the painter, dying in the prime of life, at forty in fact, homeless and pennir less — chased by duns, with worn-out constitution, loved or respected by no one. His friends at a thousand taverns have left him long ago — the pugUists, and chimney-sweeps, and picture-dealers, and rogues of all colours, have squeezed out his last penny, and left him to die in this den. Shall we go back twenty years, and show you Morland, the young genius, with forehead of Napoleon height; dark, full brown eyes, pierc ingly keen, aquUIne nose, and handsome mouth — dressed in fashionable high-caped coat and frilled shirt, shaking out his guineas on a tavern table ? Or fiirther still to his childhood, where we may trace some of the causes of his after misery ? VOL. II. L 146 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE, We meet vrith him first at the shop of his father, a picture-^dealer in the Haymarket — a prudent, methodical, sober, poUte man, whose shop was frequented by Garrick and Eeynolds, Mr. Angerstein the collector, and shoals of picture-buying noblemen, such as Lords Grosve nor, Scarsdale, and Fortescue, The elder Morland was a crayon-painter, who had once lived in affluence in Eeynolds's old house in Leicester Square, and who claimed descent from the Sir Samuel Morland, the inven tive mathematician of Charles II.'s tune, whom Pepys mentions so often. With fortune injured by greedy speculation, Morland's father seems to have been a reserved, austere man, with no powers of judgment, and with a mind strongly bent on makirig money at any sacrifice. His mother was rigidly methodical, and intent on maintaining domestic discipline and order among her chUdren, whose talent was precocious. This severity made Morland a hypocrite when young, and a sinner all the rest of his life. Education beyond the elements Morland never got, save only his father's unpractised teaching of hasty Latin and bad French. JJORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 147 Forbid toys and amusements, this young genius found his whole deUght iri dissect ing mice, and drawing objects on the floor, to tease and surprise his father. As early as seven he was declared to be a genius, and penned up for the severest training, to ensure the profitable rearing of suph a wonder. At fourteen he was articled to his father, and compeUed to work frona daylight to dark ; aU day paints perspective, and Stubbs's Anatomy of the horse, and stuniping drawings frpm the antique, and copying Dutch landscapes — copying his father's crayon-dravrlngs in oil — translating Eeynolds, Garrick, and Fu seU's nightmare into his own pictorial language, vrith more or less success. Petted and pampered, the boy-genius appeared at the easel in green coat, vrith Ipng tails and large gilt buttons, buckskin breechps, and toprboots with spurs. He was npt yet sixtepn, and the engravers were incessantly at work at his Illustra tions of songs and ballads. His studies sold for several guineas, and the father's only desire was to keep the iboy at work, and prevent him obtain ing any knowledge of pleasures that might leacj l2 148 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. him Into idleness. Books, singing, and the violin were his only recreations. The thread by which the hypocritical father held this young leopard was frail indeed. But quiet country walks to the sand-pits and hanging woods beyond Blackheath, on Sundays, would not long suffice the young reprobate. Eash and wild, he began to plunge into discreditable adventures, which proved that his ascetic education had had no other effect than depriving him of self-command, and so launching him into manhood with all the igno rance and weakness of a child ; on the first temptation he showed himself shameless and unprincipled. He obtained money for his phaeton-driving and drunken revels by selUng secret drawings, which he let down out of his vrindow by a string to his accompUces, who served him as brokers. His father had taught him nothing but how to paint flimsily and quickly for sale ; he had reftised to be apprenticed to Eomney, or Gress the Court drawing-master ; and now his evil genius, in the shape of a low publisher in Drury Lane, persuaded him to leave his father's house, and MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 149 live in an attic in Martlett Court, Bow Street, that he hired for him. His phaeton-driving and drinking, and late hours and poUce-court troubles, made the sepa ration bearable to his foolish and unprincipled father. He had given up reading and music, neglected to make Flaxman's acquaintance, and set out boldly on the road to ruin, with as fine a constitution and narrow mind as ever genius was gifted vrith. His first adventure was a blundering saU in a hoy to Gravesend, and a walk to Chatham with a tramping carpenter, and suspicious sailor, ending with a debauch of gin, to be toasted up among his companions at the "Cheshire Cheese," EusseU Court. Now he is free in his attic — free ! In green coat and gUt buttons, boots and spurs, a powder puff of hair, arid a club-tail. No more duU, dry, smaU copies of Gerard Dow — no more drawings of Stubbs's skeleton horses — no more copies of crafty father's crayon pic tures — no more dull dinners at Mr. Fpster's, the merchant, with only_ one walk a week. Every day now wiU be Sunday, Eeturn? — 150 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. not he, Biit the new life soon proves as un bearable as the old — it is only a change of prisons. Morland is kept in the attic per- petuiaUy at work on loathsome subjects, of which he paints a room-full, and gets only half-a-crown a day — worse than being at a crossing. If he asked fbr five shillings, the Irishman, his master^ buUIed and swore; and to prevent him even breathmg the air of liberty, his niggard meat and beer were brought him by his master's boy. This ought to have sobered him, but it only made him long for more vice, and more freedom tb indulge in it. At last the day of deliverance came. Mrs. HiU, a lady of fortune at Margate, wrote to him to come dovro there and paint portraits for the season. He, Morland, goes and takes his revenge on the Irishman who starved and imprisoned him lest he should be come independent^ and leave him for other employers. He gets some money in advance, and decamps, taking with him the key. A love of practical jokesj such as this, attended him through Ufe, MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 151 His letters from Margate — often in hiero glyphic, for he never could speU correctly—^ are stiU preserved. Thpy are full of regret at the restraint and dulness of the place, and longings to get back to his -smoking-club, called the " Congress," which was held at the "Cheshire Cheese." He goes to Dover, and looks at Calais, abuses Sandwich, and faUs in love with " one of the sweetest creatures," upwards of six feet high, and "extremely handsome," and already begins to get alarmed at certain symptoms of faUing health. He writes in redundant spirits, and is pleased with everything^ whether bathing- houses, dancing-rooms, play-house, or coffee house. OccasionaUy he appears at the "Con- .gress," his old haunt, shaking a purse of guineas, and boasting how much money he could eam, and saying that he was a great favourite with Mrs. HUl, who could not "bear being shut up in the society of her old maid," Here the reckless feUow lived, he tells us, after the foUowing fashion. He rose about ten, " took a gulp of gin," breakfasted with his "chum," 152 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. Lord Digby's brother, who played duets with him on the violin — dined at four, submitted to the hairdresser — ^rode upon the sands, or down Church Field and Cecil Square — drank tea with the young nobleman, whom he afterwards cut — and ended with the theatre — a notable day for a thoughtful man, verily. Here, as aU through his miserable life, Mor land offended and lost his more respectable friends, either by cold shyness, insolence, petu lance, or sheer brutality. He would break his appointment with anybody to attend a donkey- race, and he spoiled the Master of Ceremonies' embroidered coat by dropping taUow over it when he was drunk. Like a true Bohemian, Morland was never happy but when laboriously Idle. Set him to paint, and he cursed his 111 fate — ask him to ride a race or buy you a horse, and he was supremely buay, self-important, and happy. At one race, from ignorantly not dravring up his horse, or from want of skiU, he was defeated and hissed at, and had to fight his way through a swarm of lashing horsewhips. The only good letter Morland ever wrote is MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 153 a description of another race, in which he was successful, and in which he proved himself the possessor of a certain bullying sort of courage. Enraged at Morland winning so easily, about four hundred sailors, smugglers, and fishermen, furious at the loss of their half-crown bets, set upon him vrith bludgeons, stones, waggoners' whips, and pots. An innkeeper puUed him off his horse, and he feU among the mob, who were roaring, " KUl him ! — strip him ! — throw him into the sea ! — cut off his pIg-taU ! — beat his d brains out!" The poor feUow in the striped sUk jacket ran for shelter into a booth; but there the wretches, equaUy vexed at their losses, threw him again to the yelping people, who would have kiUed him, had not a gentle man suddenly dismounted and taken up the half-kiUed painter, telling the mob "he would mark the first who touched the jockey." A party of Ught horsemen, then some gentlemen and their servants, some post-boys, hair-dressers, and bakers, then armed themselves with sticks, and came to Morland's help, bringing him a horse, restoring him his hat, and enabUng him to mount. That night, at the "King's Head," 154 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. Morland teUs his "bloods and bucks" his wrongs, Flushed by three crowns' worth of punch, pro bably supplied by Morland, the band saUy out to a fishingr-house to avenge the painter's in juries. Unforturiately Morland and his braves were overpowered, and the hero himself is feaught by a saUor whom he is about to run through when some companions, coming up, give the mariner "his gruel." The man whp dismounted him, however, they punish, and another of the ruffians Morland brings an action against. Morland ends his letter de scribing this scene very forcibly^ by saying the watchman is just then under his vrindow crying "past one o'clock." Having dishonourably, and for the meanest pecuniary reasons, broken off his match with Mrs. HiU's lady's-maid, with whom he was iri love, he set off with his patroness to St. Omer (via Calais), crossing, "amazing quick, in one hour, thirty-five minutes." He writes to a cer tain friend named " Dicky," from a great, bare, cold hotel room, sixteen feet high, with a Gxe- place as big as an attic. Over a bottle of claret he rails a,t cheating French Waiters, and the dirty MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 155 friars In veriniriy brown frocks, who venture their lives at fires. Like Hogarth, he sketches the fish-wives, and he goes to the hotel at Calais " that Heme," he says, " speaks of"- — he sleeps in a large, double-bedded room, such as Heme de scribes — ^he sees the French soldiers flying kites on the rampart — and is laughed at by the street boys. At St. Omer he is enchanted; gentlemen and marquises flock in for portraits; exUed friends of the Pretender fill his studio. He makes sketches— he returns to England, just for a trip, intending to spend months in France. Of course he never returns again. He leaves Margate for a few days — ^he never returned, but plunged into London to live with his father, and to subsist by accidental employment. A creature of Impulse, he was led by the thought of the moment, and he carried out no Intention which he did not turn into action the very moment he conceived it. But Fortune had not yet forsaken him. Several times in his Ufe she led him to cross-roads, where new and better paths lay before him. He now went to live with Mr. WiUiam Ward, at Ken- sal Green, and there married his friend's sister, a beautiful and sensible woman, whose health 156 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. he mined by his brutality andiU-treatment, and whose heart he finaUy broke, if ever woman's heart was broken. The two young couples (for Ward had mar ried Morland's sister) removed to High Street, Marylebone, where he adopted a sort of weak Hogarthian manner, and painted " The Idle and Industrious Mechanic," " Letitia, or Seduc tion," and " The Idle Laundress and Industrious Cottager," in which the painting was more care ful, firmer, and finished than usual. The draw ing, too, was better, and there was more thought and care visible than he had before manifested. But from the moment that the famUies quar reUed and separated, and he went to Uve at Warren Place, Camden Town, his downward career began. Too shy to seU his ovm pictures, he now began to employ a regular agent, who lived with him, and who raised money for him, effected his bargains, and sold his pictures often before they were finished. His first factotum was a man named Simon, whom he ruined by teaching him to drink, and who eventually killed himself by the deadly bottle. MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 157 His next protegi was Dirty Brookes, a shoe maker, who joined in aU his debauches, who followed him into the country, and who helped him to avoid the baUiffs — and who repeatedly sat to him, as Simon had done, for a model. His amusements at this period of degradation were to write satirical songs for bUnd fiddlers to play under the windows of friends who had vexed him, to scrape the violin at taverns, to treat post-boys to drink, and to take rides on the top of the Hampstead and Barnet stage-coaches. As he advanced in Ufe, he left off going to the ale-house in a daubed painting-coat, with only one skirt and one sleeve, and took the chair in boots and buckskin breeches, like a "jen'leman," as the post-boys, his sworn friends, often, we have no doubt, observed, when the painter sat giring the law to his circle of colourers, engravers, prIntseUers, and appren tices. Morland's jokes consisted In firing off a pistol at an old patrol's ear, and stuffing stale mackerel into the lining of tavern chairs ; or in turning for a time parish constable, for the sake of the parochial dignity of the office; sometimes 158 MORLAND IN THB SPONGING HOUSE. sketching the soldiers, drummers, and deserters who came to be blUeted. As Morland's rices became more ingrained, his fame increased. Mr. E. Smith, the publisher, em ployed him, and all his best works were engraved by Mr. Ward, his brother-in-law. " The Effects of Extravagance" was twice engraved, and his name became known aU over France and Germany; five hundred copies of " The Dancing Dogs " and ^' SeUIng Guinea Pigs " (a pair) were sold in a few weeks. He had now changed his style, and could , paint so quick that he earned twelve guineas a week. His great success was at this time in pictures of children, such as Biggs was celebrated for. When he got his first picture, f' BUnd Man's Buff," done, and sold it for twelve guineas, he and his fidus Achaies, Dirty/Brookes, drank off twelve glasses of gin, to celebrate the triumph. For the adult heads in hand he took friendly post-boys and Dirty Brookes ; for women, his wife and sister; and for chUdren, those in the neighbourhood, whom he encouraged to play about his painting-room. At other times, for stable scenes he strewed the floor vrith straw, and set Dirty Brookes MORLAND IN THB SPONGING HOUSE. 159 at the window to watch for a red cloak, or anything he wanted to introduce into his do mestic scenes. His subjects in one year alone embraced several hundred situations of boys' rustic life — playing at soldiers, nutting, svrim- ming ships, bathing, skating, robbing an orchard, angling, gathering blackberries, gathering flowers — ^besides scenes bearing on slavery, shipwrecks, and monetary difficulties. Eepeatedly dishonouring his bills, and being two hundred pounds in debt, Morland made a midnight flitting, secretly removed his pictures, and, leaving a cart-load of cinders and some pewter-pots to the landlord, sought refuge in a debtor's sanctuary. In a few months, his attorney obtaining him a letter of Ucence, Mor land re-appeared in dayUght, and settied in Leicester Street, from whieh, after many mu tations, he removed to a house in Padding ton, opposite a drover's inn, where he hoped easily to get horses and oxen to paint. Oh, miserable son of the Haymarket bankrupt picture-dealer ! turn, ere it be too late, from thy long protracted mud bath ; hast thou npt already sown acres and acres of vrild oats, and 160 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. are not they sufficient for the devU's reaping, without more reckless sovring for the same dreadful harvest ? Think of thy early talent and of thy young wife — repent whUe it is called to-day, for the night cometh when no man may work. Oh that Morland's guardian angel could have warned him that the paUet- bed in which he was to die was already being sewn together, and that already the miser able room in the sponging-house of Hatton Garden waited for the dead man ! Morland ! Morland ! better for thee that thou hadst never been bom, when the terrible voice shall ask thee for thy talent buried so deep in the mire ! But to return to Morland's beer-drinking and smoke-fumed world. Busy at stables and cattle pieces, we left Morland at Paddington, then a suburban viUage. He lives opposite the " White Lion" Inn, kept by a man named Cattle, He painted the sign of that inn, and keeps his eight saddle-horses there in the fuU flush of vulgar extravagance. He chose this present house that he might be near the " White Lion," where the carriers stopped to take up parcels MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 161 and refresh themselves and horses. He finds his window convenient for sketching groups of horses and men. In this house he held levees of small slashing picture-defers, pugiUsts and horse-dealers, who aU despise him, and, hating each other, only combine in one object, to rob their patron. Here, in rooms stuffed with guinea-pigs, dogs, rabbits, and squirrels, he holds his blackguard audiences of cheats and bullies. The horse-dealers flatter his vanity, and take advantage of his. Ignorance — bartering bad horses for good pictures. The picture-dealers and vrine- merchants discount him bUls, and renew them for hasty pictures and enormous ransoms of in terest. The pugiUsts knock him about, and charge him for their trouble. With Dirty Brookes at his right hand, and aU these weasels and scorpions and foxes at his heels, Morland is fast sinking Into a black gulf of perdition. The pugilists blacken his eyes, then drink his vrine and praise his skiU. The horse- dealers caU him a knowing one, and praise his bargains. The picture-vampires flatter his VOL. II. ' M 162 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. genius, and encourage him to borrow money. He goes to Bob BeUamy's inn, at Highgate, to joke with the stage-coachmen, and, pipe in mouth, treat every post-boy with gin and brandy ; he knows every Jarvey on the North Eoad ; it is the special pride of this reckless drunkard ; and when an ostler laughs at his coarse jokes, it is his humour to reward the crafty flatterer with half-a-crown, or a pair of buckskin breeches only just soiled. Ten thousand a-year would not support this shameless Ufe, and yet half he spends is raised on biUs, which he is never prepared to take up. Fool, fool ! every seed thou sowest is seed for the future whirlwind. And yet with all this vulgar debauchery the man works, and with taste and skill, too, though he is very unequal, and generaUy repeats himself: only lately the stables of the " White Lion" have furnished him vrith one of his best pictures. The Farmer's Stable, quite a champion work, and A 1 at the Eoyal Academy, and sold for his highest price ; and the Eev. Henry Bate Dudley, as usual, bought through " Dirty Brookes ;" for Morland, with his MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 163 shuffling and broken promises, has tired out everybody reasonably respectable. The subject is merely a team of horses enter ing a stable, with a man gathering up loose hay, and a boy leading a grey horse, the nostrU of which is too dilated. The carter's pony, a cun- clng little Welsh " thing," half roguish, half good- natured, is admirable. AU this time, unable to bear the society of virtuous women, or the restraint of good society? Morland grew lower and lower in taste. If he ever tried to rise into the gentleman, Morland's old associates soon dragged him down vrith their dirty hands from what they deemed his "bad eminence." Once he was riding to ¦ Barnet with two gentlemen, trying, with much inward vexa tion and hurt pride, to do and speak like them. At Whetstone turnpike the three were stopped by a jockey-cart containing a pugUIsI, a tinman, and a chimney-sweep, who were wrangling about the toU. Morland was pushing by, when "the flaming tinman " cried out : — " Why, Muster Morland, won't you speak to a feody?" Morland tried to shuffle by, but in vain. The m2 164 MORLAND rN THE SPONGING HOUSE. tinman shook him heartily, by the hand, and tuming to the sweep, sald-r- " Why, Dick, don't ye know this 'ere gen'man. Muster Morland." Uppn which, vrith a great absence of pride, he crammed his sable fingers into Morland's hand. This was a standing joke, that gaUed Morland much, and he always declared the sweep was an entire stranger to him, and forced on him by Hooper, the fighting tinman. Sometimes Morland got even severer rebukes than this. Eaphael Smith, FuseU's friend^ once called on him with Bannister the actor. They saw Morland's work, and then were going to take leave. " Stop a moment," said Morland, " and I vrill go vrith you — "Morland," said Eaphael Smith, sternly, "I have, an appointment with a gentleman" Morland swore at the engraver, and returned growUng to his easel. It was at Paddington that Morland painted his picture of the "Cottagers," engraved by his brother-in-law, Mr. W. Ward. It represents a farmer sitting at his own door, watching his MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 165 children playing. These stolen pictures could be only wrung from Morland by the necessity of getting money to renew biUs, or by playing sham bailiff near his house. Then he would work out his snow-pieces, or hunting scenes, or children, or pigs from early morning (6 a.m.) till sunset ; yet there were times when he Would study Stubbs's Anatomy, and try and rival Gilpin's blood horses. On his return from a visit to a fox-hunting squire In Leicestershire, Morland changed all his habits ; he gave up picture-cheats and horse- cheats, and hid hiriiself in Hackney with his wife and his five-bottle friend. Dirty Brookes. Here he lived so retired that he , was suspected of coining, and Bow-street runners were serit down to arrest him and search his house, BeUeving them baUIffs, Morland fled through a back door across the fields to Hoxton. The bank directors, dis covering their mistake, sent the poor timorous debauchee two twenty-pound notes. In every nook and sanctuary In the four counties round London, Morland sought refuge. In every street creditors dogged him; If any one even looked hard at him, he ran away. If any creditor discovered his retreat, he In- 166 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. stantly decamped, and left "Dicky" the water man or "Dirty Brookes" to fetch away his painting tools. One day, wearied of this horrid Ufe, Mbr- land took Brookes to visit the King's Bench, to know what the worst would be. He left with extreme horror of "The Bare." Yet even at this time Morland could get four guineas a day and his drink for twelve hours' work. But then the dealer had to watch him and keep him sober, or he would seU the un finished sketch to any one who came in, leaving the first purchaser to bear the loss. It was in these retreats that he painted with sow and pigs under his cupboard, and with a bottle of gin hanging by his easel, or was met in re tired streets vrith a sucking pig under his arm. A last gleam of sunshine breaks upon this miserable man before he sinks into a prison. He went to the Isle of Wight to sketch fishermen, and at Yarmouth was apprehended as a spy, and warned of the consequences of sketching the English coast. Morland and Wil liams the engraver, a brother-in-law, left Deal on that tour penniless. Half way they stopped MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 167 at a road-side inn, and Morland paid half his score by painting a black bull as a sign for the landlord. With angry reluctance the landlord let them go without paying the over plus of the bill. A few days after, a gentle man, who heard Mprland teU the story at the "Hole-in-the-WaU" Tavern m Fleet Street, in stantly rode down into Kent, and gave ten guineas for the sign to the astonished landlord. Now began the more wretched part of Mor land's life. He was arrested, and removed to a squalid lodging in the " Eules of the Bench." He painted stiU fpr the dealers, and if the purchaser was not ready at the moment, off went Dicky with the pigs, or cottage chil dren, or fishermen, to the pawnbrokers. On one occasion, the pawnbroker, going up stairs to his gaUery with the picture, stumbled, and smudged out half a pig. This Morland refused to repair, unless he received five more guineas In addition to the three first. The threat of an action wrung this out of the greedy pawn broker. Always vain and petulant, Morland's great ambition now was, when he got a day-rule 168 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. in term time," to throw by his brushes, borrow a horse, and ride round to visit his friends in the suburbs, exhibiting himself at every pbt-house, and denying, unblushingly, the story of his imprisonment. A bailiff gene raUy attended him as servant, and sometimes let out the secret, by chiming into the con versation with, "Give me leave, Mr. Moriand, I remember veil I vos ari officer in the Fleet." Now too, though loaded with commissions, ' Morland grew careless, and neglected finish, so that the truthful dealer had to "glkze up his foregrounds." A straw-yard was his especial aboEolination, having found their execution la borious; and on the back of one which he painted last he wrote, " No more Straw- Yards for me.-^G. Morland." Alas ! no longer the fafeility remains to him, that once painted in six hours a tired post boy, in an ale-house kitchen near Harrow^ gone, gone for ever! When I was young. Ah! woful ivTie'H, How far unlike the now and then. When the Insolvent Debtors' Act set Mor- MORLANDIN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 169 land free, h^ had no longer the power to enjoy freedom. His health was gone, and his only friends were the lowest picture-dealers — nay, one person in the world stUl loved the degraded genius, and that was his forsaken wife. Then palsy struck him a numbing blow, and he could no longer hold his palette in his left hand. Sometimes he would fall back senseless into his chair, sometimes he . would sink into a death-like sleep for hours together before his easel. StUl cheerful and contented, so long as he could work, or eat and drink, Morland went on, drawing in pencil and chalk, and tinting these drawings Ughtly with colour. He stIU continued at his low lodgings in St. Georges Fields, associating with baiUffs and cheating low clerks — then lovyer, lovver still In the mud- swamp, he separated from his vvife, and went to live with a sheriff's officer in EoU's Build ings. At last, arrested under a Marshalsea Court writ, the miserable palsied man was taken to a low sponging-house in Air Street, Hatton Garden, where, drinking immoderately of gin to drown his care, a fever seized his 170 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. exhausted body, and he died in a few days. Death had put in the last execution, and the skeleton man was in possession — no more writs now — " Malice domestic — foreign leyy— nothing Can touch him further." The gross Napoleon face lies cold and sunken on the dirty sponging-house piUow. No more rude hands will grasp that shoulder — no more harsh voices cry "on Muster Lacquer's suit" . — no time now to achieve old promises, and no time to pay debts. Dead, dead in the stifling garret of a sponging-house — beggared, alone, friendless ! Was this, George Morland, thou lost genius, the happy end of a weU- spent life ? But here comes the parish undertaker, with sour, unfeeling face, to measure and to plan how cheaply he may do his ghastly work. Let us go into the air and turn our backs on Hatton Garden. As an artist, Morland is not difficult to sum up. Occasionally gross, sometimes a plagiarist, Morland is generally fresh and simple in his rural figures. His portraits, when he did not make the sitter too MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. 171 old, are strong and Eembrandtish ; but it is for his horses, dogs, and pigs (his cows are poor), Morland is speciaUy remarkable. Though imi tating Gainsborough in children, and Eeynolds in his female figures, Morland, certainly, in such pictures as the " Hard Bargain," not only anticipated such painters as Bird, Wilkie, Ibbetson, but even Landseer himself. His pic tures from novels are tame beside Stothard, but they are often equaUy gracefiil and tasteful. Yet every gift of nature Morland threw away. Versatile, he repeated himself — vigorous, he ruined his constitution — industrious, he spent half his time in debauchery, and died at last in a sponging-house in Hatton Garden, a worn- out, miserable wretch, scarcely deserving our pity. Pigs he painted, and pig he was. The instinct of natural sympathy led Morland to the sty, and there, and in the pot-house, he was at home. There was genius in him, no doubt; but the light was from below — ^it came not from the sun, but from the bottomless pit. He worked hard, for he left some four thousand pictures; but his subjects seldom rose higher than the 172 MORLAND IN THE SPONGING HOUSE. smifg'gler's hut, or the yard of a stable. He has well been called the Brauwer of EngUsh Art; but Brauwer had more thought, and before he lay down to die on that miserable paUet-bed in the Antwerp Hospital, had depicted, expressed more forcibly, the miserable pleasure of his iU- spent life. Weary of the pursuit of baUIffs, his constitution gone, his hand paralysed, we find him no longer the idol of post-boys and pugilists, but dying, miserable and neglected, in the Hatton Garden sponging-house. Can this be the little smart-dressed genius whom we have seen the wonder of lords and ladies, when he drew Ulus trations to the Fairy Queen, or sat in his father's library, reading Du Fresnon, and dreaming of what great things he would do when he once be came his own master. Dead upon the sponging- house bed, we leave the unhappy painter, unpitied and unwept, save by one, who, in one short month, vrill follow the EngUsh Brauwer to the grave. 173 CHAPTEE VIIL DAVID SCOTT. From an honest, sturdy old Scottish stock came David of the high aims — his grandfather a glover of Lanark, his grandmother a merchant burgess's daughter, of the same burgh. Eobert, one of the glover's sons, being praised for some clever pen-and-ink copies of Hogarth's engrav ings,' was articled to a clever Edinburgh en graver, named Eobertson, who iUustrated the " Scot's Magazine." There being only one room to the poor shop, the smart prentice had to en grave at the window of the passage, tiU one o'clock came, when Eobertson w'ent up to St. Giles's airy steeple to fulfil his duty of ringing the chimes. 174 DAVID SCOTT. In the ParUament stairs, higher than St. Giles's roof, lived the young engraver, in 1806, when David Scott, the genius, was bom. His parents, crushed by the loss of four chU dren almost at once, were gloomy, and asce- ticaUy reUgious; and with them, in a smaU country house at St. Leonards, grew up David. In chUdhood he was observant and thoughtful, and, it was recorded, frightened himself by a ghost of his own making, and lining a Uttle recess with prints, turned it into a picture-gal lery, for which he charged his brothers a penny each for admission. In his father's shop he met vrith Bumet, the exceUent engraver of WUkie's pictures — and Stewart, who perpetuated Sir W. AUan's pic tures. The Ufe in the lonely house at St. Leo nards was not a cheery one — the father, a gloomy invalid, to whom mirth appeared almost a crime, and an old uncle, who thought of no thing but his dogs and pigeons. David, who was always drawing or reading, was the auto crat of the family. His father, too, is reduced In circumstances, and the genius has to breast DAVID SCOTT. 175 the hlU pf life, and give up his verses and his ambitions, which are already somewhat gigantic. The stings of IncontroUable Instinct soon Impelled him on, at all risks, to turn pain ter and abandon engraving. Here a genius was iiaturally disgusted with the dreary toil and the utter want of originality required to mas ter the repetitive art, and founding a life- academy, and beginning a grand high art pic ture of "Lot and his daughters fleeing from the cities of the plain," he writes in his diary the following morning prayer : — "Thou Power, by whose aid men raise the imperishable name, wrap round me Thy tongued flames, and of the present make immortal days. May I live not vrithout, a consecrated purpose in my life : may I reach and grasp all means for this ultimate consummation. Grant that I may hold on with underiating step. Strengthen the vrill, endow with the power, break the arm that would retard." What a fierce pagan-prayer for a brave young Puritan stmggler, who thinks aU who oppose him are PhiUstines, and accursed of God! In 1826 he exhibits his, first ominous 176 RAVID SCOTT. picture, "The Hopes of Genius dispeUed by early Death," and comes to London, to see, at the Somerset House, Etty's " Marriage " and Danby's " Opening of the Last Seal," At the British Institution he sees Haydon's " Tri umphant Entry of Christ into Jerusalem ; " goes to hear Irving preach ; and, with Allan Cunningham, visits Chantrey Gallery, and sees Turner's private pictures. But at last breaking through his gnavring soUtude, the genius starts for Italy, there to reaUy extend the boundaries of his mind. He is delighted, as his poetical mind might well be, vrith the country of the great dead men. The splendour of the Venetian school, how ever, he thinks material. He sees the influence of the shining, bright country upon the painters. Bologna he calls in his letters a heavy, gloomy town, with its piazzaed streets ; and the Caracci art dark, coarse, and unideal. When the Eoman fountains blew in chill spray, and sunshine was scarce in the Eternal city, David Scott arrived. The snow is half- an-Inch thick in the Borghese Gardens. Gibson, Vernet, Wesbeck, Macdonald, and DAVID SCOTT. 177 Leven, are working at Eome. Everything muses him, even down to the poodle-clippers, beggars, and models that sit on the steps of Trinita del Monte, the vendors of sham art- antiques, the pompous landlords. The views of Soott intensify rapidly in Eome ; he determines more and riiore, cost what it may, to strive high. He gives indi vidual form and colour, as garb for abstract intention, and laments that reUgion, with its symbols, is wearing away into the mere specu lative; but perpetually "in the midst of his dreams of ambition comes his waUing cry, " This climate destroys me ! " and he is appaUed at the awful gloomy houses, full of painters, so few of whom are ever to become known. David Scott had had a bitter, disenchanting visit at Eome ; he found the city, with its tepid air, only fit for vegetables, and feared that it would make him love idleness. In spite of Gibson, and Wyatt, and Cornelius, there was no hope there for the Idealist. He found the artists forgetting the end in the means. He leaves in disgust, packs up his dreams, and returns to Edinburgh. He had VOL. II. N . 178 DAVID SCOTT. executed his great struggling picture of " Dis cord" now; he painted an altar-piece - for a Catholic chapel, and attempted a " Caliban and Ariel," and an "Alchemist Lecturing on the Elixir Vitas," the latter a speciaUy strange romantic imagination. In 1841 he completed his characteristic " Queen EUzabeth at the Globe Theatre, vrit- nessing the 'Merry Wives of Windsor.'" The picture was a very meritorious one, and it contained portraits, inteUectual and refined, of Spencer, Fletcher, SackviUe, Ben Jonson, &c. And as David Scott, a true-born genius and enthusiast. If not a great painter, planned, thpught out all these things with all his heart and aU his • soul. Death was busy opening fresh doors into the great .darkness, and pushing through those whom the stiU, smaU, irresistible voice had caUed. .His father and brother died, and he was left more alone In the world, to carry on, through dark and shine, his work. His in tervening time ' was spent in writing some clever but crabbedly-worded articles on Art for " Blackwood's Magazine." This unequal but strong mind was con- DAVID SCOTT. 179 tlriually throwing out fresh flowers of fancy. In 1841 he began his best known picture, "Vasco de Gama encountering the Spirit of the Cape." The same year he drew forty sketches for the " PUgrim's Progress," and pamted a sombre, powerful picture of the "Duke of Gloucester entering the Water-gate of Calais." The subject from Camoens was treated In a way that showed a fine feeling for the super natural. The scene represents the ship caught and entangled in a wild chain of lightning, and high from the surge the pale ghoul rises to appal the crew. But from his fairy and historical scenes the Cartoon Exhibition in Westminster Hall roused David Scott to enter the lists. He sent two -^- " Drake witnessing the Destruction of the Spanish Ships," and "Wallace defending Scot land," both of which were failures. " They were vast sketches," some critic observed, "vrithout mural or fresco adaptation. Their figures were vigorous, but slightly made out." But the time was coming when no man may work. Let it be good or bad that he has done, he must leave it; for Death Is n2 180 DAVID SCOTT. , staring through his window, and nodding to him to come and leave his yet unblossomed dreams. In suffering had he toiled ; the nepenthe he had prayed for was coming to his lips. He had prayed long for peace, and now death brought that flower of immortality. Almost the last words he uttered were criti cisms on his own picture of " De Gama." That picture was exhibiting the day he died ; and the artist wept for joy when, on his death bed, he was told there was a proposition to buy it for some public hall. One of the last paintings he had executed was a portrait of Emerson. One of the last words he wrote in his diary was the one pathetic word, " withering ! " In one of his later letters, this brave soul, that perished in its pride, describes the way he spent the latter months of his life when he was illustrating Professor NIchol's " Architecture of the Heavens." He lived much, he says. In the open air — on brae-sides, in woods. In caves — and repaired often to a secret knoU on a certain hUl, that he had found to be a mount of transfiguration for his BAVID SCOTT. 181 imagination. In the little drawing-room of his mother's house, which was his study, he read the Bible, and Shakspere, Wilhelm Meister, Eabelais, Sir W. HamUton, Eeid, and BerzeUus's Chemistry, A German philpsopher called in fancy a perpetual Messiah — home David Scott called a perpetual paradise, not without its tree in the garden. He felt a better and purer man, he says, there — the soul became there again pliant and fresh. "A little vmting," he adds, " a Uttle reading, a little conversation with my sisters, a little walking, and much endless cogitation, make up my little day." One of David Scott's latest designs, entitled " The Procession of Unknown Powers," typifies admirably his struggles and aspirations. A winged spirit rests on the ground, while round him float other spirits, bearing flames in their hands. David Scott died, a man of promises unperformed. We may well append to this short biography the verses of Blake the painter- poet, that the poet-painter's poet brother affixes to the last chapter of his loving biography, fer vently trusting that that dear soul found peace. 182 DAVID SCOTT. "The door of death is made of gold. That mortal eyes can ne'er behold; But when the mortal eyes are closed. And cold and pale the Umbs reposed. The soul awakes, and wondering sees In her bright hands the golden key." CHiPTERS ON ART. 185 CHAPTEE IX. EPOCHS OP PAINTING. Our early writers on Art have done much harm by repeating, from mouth to mouth, absurd le gends about Greek painting. The only results clearly ascertained are these two smaU facts — ffirst, that nearly aU we now know of ancient Greek painting we get from Pliny, that apoplectic col lector, vrithout inquiry of truths and Ues : secondly; that the waU-paintings of Pompeu are the soUtary evidences of that much-lauded art. We wIU try and prove that, firstly, the testimonies of Pliny are mere uninvestigated legends, sewn together iri patchwork fashion by an industrious sciolist, who knew nothing of the art he wrote about ; and fur- er, that fro m all possible evidence existing it 186 EPOCHS OF PAINTING, is clear that the Greeks never attained, in paint ing, to anything but a very crude and barbaric art ; modern painting being the only true result of all their centuries of labour, . Of course we start with the Corinthian legend of the origin of painting by the Corinthian maiden tracing on the moon-lit waU of the laurel-shaded temple the silhouette of her departing lover. You may stiU see on the mantelpieces of London lodging-houses, the negro shadow of Mrs. Gri per's departed husband. Your attention wiU be dravm to such black profiles. You wiU probably, when you inquire the price of the rooms, be in formed that Mr. Griper was " a blessed creature." When you hear this, think of the Corinthian maiden, and wonder at the slow progress of Art, We need scarcely say that the truth of this old fable is of about the same value as the story of Daedalus turning a shark's jaw into the first saw ; or of Mercury stringing a turtle-sheU and caUing it a lyre. One thing is evident, that, somehow or other, through the Pelasgi who left us the Uons of Mycenas as art-legacies, Grecian art came directly or indirectly from Egypt and the East ; for Cad mus and his dragon's teeth, jDecrops and Danaus, EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 187 all point to the East as the origin of Greek civi lization. Vulcan was a smith and Daedalus a car penter, but in Greek mythology we look in vain for the artist. Homer mentions that the prows of ships were smeared red and purple ; but then his use of the names of colours was uncertain and barbaric. He never mentions painting, without the aid of which science any nation's nomencla ture of colours must always be imperfect : even now EngUsh ladies, we frequently observe, call ribbons blue when they mean lUac, and poppy when they mean cherry-coloured. Our poets say golden-coloured when they mean yellow, and fiery when they mean simply red. The words ex pressing colours are the most indefinite and unli mited of any we have put ofthe controversial re gions of metaphysics. Knowing as we do the Umits of embroidery, we may easily guess what joggling, quaint figures struggled as Greeks and Trojans on the diplax of Helen, who, like an Amazonian queen, , embroidered her robes with needlework representations of battles. No doubt the figure of Sesostrls, armed with bow and jave lin, that Herodotus saw on the way from Ephesus to Phocsea, was a piece of art about equal to our 188 EPOCHS OF PAINTING, snuff-shop' Highlanders. As for the battle of the Magnetos, by the painter Bularchus, executed 16 B.C. for the foolish Candaules, king of Lydia, for which he gave its weight in gold, it was pro bably something like the conflict that an Indian brave smears with vermiUon on his buffalo-skin* From these early legends, related by an ignorant and careless authority (Pliny), we gather only this small sesame seed of truth — that Art flourished in Ionia after the Persian conquest, and in the is lands of the JEgean Sea before it did in Greece. Very few of the Greek stories, however, bear a moment's examination; for what can a rational being (not an E,A,) think of a purple em broidered MUesian shawl seUing for 120 talents (29,000Z.) ? — and what but darkness can we filter from the story of Herodotus, that at the siege pf Phocaea (544 B,C.), the citizens fled to Chios vrith all their valuables, except paintings, which could not be removed? There is some mistake about the very word paintings — perhaps they were not worth removing : if London were in danger, should we aU fly with carts ^ to the Pantheon? I think not. Nbw as day breaks we come to the real EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 189 Grecian art, "developed (?) about 600 B.C." WeU now, what do we find after aU the ridi culous stories about the pictures bought for their weight in gold (a story you may stUl hear in every third country-house in England)? Has Art gone on since Bularchus, 716 B.C.? No. PUny gives a long list, certainly, of Cleanthes, Telephanes, Dinas, Charmadas, and other great men, but goes on to teU us that they were aU painters in one colour ; and Euma3us of Athens, he says, first distinguished the sexes. This does not look very like high Art. Cimon bf CleouEe, his successor, invented foreshortening about the time of Solon. Some how or other, our exact Pliny leaves us a gap of three soUd centuries without one painter ; and thia says a good deal for the success and flourishing of Greek Art. With Polygnotus, whom Cimon brought from Thaxos, (463 B.C.), " the Greek development of Art began," says a credulous author. He painted portraits, and decorated a portico in Athens with a picture of the "Eape of Cas sandra." Lucian says he was one of the four greatest colourists of Greece ; and Aristotle 190 EPOCHS OP PAINTING. says he painted men better than they were ; though improvement on God's work is now thought rather difficult, if not impossible. His draperies were truthful, yPt graceful and flow ing ; so some people may think our own Mr. Hurlstone's. His great work was the "Destruc tion of Troy," in the portico of the Temple of ApoUo at Delphi. " Great dog," says our friend Old Tap, who is prepared to admire anything that is old ; but what do we find ? — that this celebrated work had no perspective or composition' but what was made up of figures ranged in three tiers. Then came Dionyslus of Colophon, who painted " men as they are;" then Micon of Athens, who exceUed in horses, and yet, as -^Uan says, did not know that they had not lashes to their under eyelids. Micon painted the Battles of the Amazons, and of the Centaurs and Laplthae. Yet of Micon, too, we are told that he was fined thirty mlnse for making the Persians large out of aU proportion. As for Panjenus's " Battle of Marathon," we cannot say much, for we hear that Miltiades wanted his name written over EPOCHS OP PAINTING. 191 his figure, to show which it was. About 468 B.C. Apollodoms, the rival of Zeuxis, came on the stage, and because, forsooth, Pliny speaks of his power . of light and shade, Mr. Womum calls him the "Grecian Eembrandt." With Zeuxis, a fresh sea of legends burst upon us, even to eloquent dilatations on the Juno-Uke character of form this painter gave to his women. He is said to have been eccentric in the choice of subjects, and to have painted Helen from the cuUed beauties of flve Grotonian virgins. This picture was exhibited, -^Uan says, for money In the temple of Juno. With all this exactness, however. It Is not yet certain whether Zeuxis painted on walls or panels, nor does Pausanias In his Art tour even mention him. TImanthes of Sicyon is praised by the old writers, who have done so much injury . to Art, as remarkable for origi nality of fancy. He was the astounding in ventor of the idea of making Agamemnon hide his face at the sacrifice of Iphigenia — a trick about as ingenious as that of the old portrait painters, who, in order to shirk drawing the 192 EPOCHS OF PAINTING. hand, stuck it out of sight deep in the waist coat. The " Eclectic " (Caracci) period, which is the favourite one of aU Academicians, with whom the form always drowns the essence, is compared to the Alexandrian period of Greek Art, when Apelles was the king. The student at the school of PamphUus studied ten years. The charm of the brush of ApeUes was grace ; yet though Protogenes finished too highly, Asclepiodoms exceUed him in proportion. Yet the most ingenious of Art-theorists must allow that nothing can be made of the story of the rival lines of ApeUes and Protogenes, unless the linea mean the outline of a human form. Pro togenes seems to have excelled In painting highly-finished mules and dogs; and of Pauslas, we are told that he was famous for drawing a foreshortened buU, vrith a shadow that showed its size (which is absurd). It is rather a stultifying fact for the mere academic rhapsodlst about Greek Art, that scarcely a genuine fragment of its purest and best age remains to us. We have uncertain copies mecha nically executed from the copies of Phidias and EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 193 Praxiteles. We have, perhaps, figments, hints, and sketches of their works from vases, gems, and bas-reliefs; but we have nothing but one great omnipresent guess really to go by* Even in sculpture, where the genius of the Greeks for Art found Its highest, if not its only expression, aU the most distinguished remains — the volup tuous Antinous, the writhing Laocoon, the Torso of Apollonius, are late and Eomanlzed. As for painting, we can only go to PompeU, and see the not ungraceful daubs of country-town decorators in a nation that imported, but did not produce its art — at a period, too, when even In Greece there was little but stiU-Ufe pictures and obscene cari catures to be had. One of their greatest genre painters was AntiphUus, who lived at the court of one of the Ptoleinies : he painted dressmakers' rooms, boys blowing the fire, cobblers' stalls, and barbers' shops. AntiphUus was the Greek Wil kie, only he was vrise enough to keep to what he could do. It took a long time to teach the ItaUans Art. It is easy to see exactly how long — ^from the day Mummius sacked Corinth, 146 B.C., to 1260 A.D., when Cimabue began to work, and found, on VOL. II. 0 194 JEPOCHS OF PAINTING, Byzantine traditions, a Christian school of Art, The Eomans never had a painter, but they had a miUion "low-backed slaves," such as Juvenal mentions, whp would colour their walls vrith Pompelan dancing nymphs, and who drew by geometric laws rather than by ariy instinct. Greek art, Kiigler says, truly sprang from Greek religion — so did Christain art from Christianity; but it was left for the Protestants to dIscPver , that Art need not be confined to the Church, but may enter into every branch and phase of life. History shows a proridence perpetually fiUing graniaries and reservoirs vrith hoarded strength, rirtue, and life, to be redistributed over the world in times of famine, atrophy, and decay. What we caU volcanic ages in history are but the riolent dispersions of long-hidden currents of richest blessing. What we caU death, say the alchemists, is but a change — a re-making, a shuffle of nature's kaleidoscope. So it is vrith Art. The destruction of Corinth flooded Europe with statues as stan dards of beauty. The sack of Syracuse inun dated the worid, as when a dam breaks dowm and lets out the waters. The removal of empire from Eome to Byzantium sent flocks of statues to EPOCHS OP PAINTING. 195 revolutionize the East; from which again, after the Gothic darkness, classic art returned to ally itself to the art of the Norse barbarian. Incredi ble have been the ravages of fire and sword upon the works of Art. Genseric gutted Eome to adorn Carthage. The sons of Theodosius de- sti'oyed all pagan temples and statues they could reach. The Iconoclasts worked with the cruel malignity of bigots. Then came the Crusade fires, which must have destroyed more of the Constantinople reUcs of Art, but at last gave rise to the intercourse between the East and West, and finaUy, through Venice, to the rise of Italian art. Yet stUl — for Providence wIU not let good things perish— we have, in spite of this perpetual pounding of Time's hammer, a fine cabinet of Greek reUcs left, sufficient for aU useful purposes of instruction and warning. They taught Giotti and his men dravring. They may stiU teach us something. To us, indeed, the destruction of Greek painting is sufficient proof of its uselessness to future ages. The Bible did not perish. Homer did not perish. The Nieb- elungen lied did not perish. Our old baUads did 02 196 EPOCHS OP PAINTING. not perish. Nothing worth preserring has ever perished, ' It is a curious thing that Art not only origi nated in paganism, but seems to have been at first looked upon with as much horror by the early Christians as it was by the early Puritans, who found it an ally of the reUgion they warred against ; just as the Jews forbade artists to dwell among them, and TertuUIan would not baptize painters till they renounced their iniquitous trade, God was a Spirit, they said ; how can we repre sent Him by lines and colours? They were afraid of idolatry, and remembered the old decrees of the stone-table against graven images, Clement of Alexandria thought it not unbecoming in his unsettled age of thought to write against the use of images in excess, recommending the mere Christian symbols of the dove, the fish, the lyre, and the anchor, such as the use of the Catacombs had sanctioned. It was not till the fourth century that fresco paintings seem to have been introduced into Italian churches, to preach through the eye to the rude congrega tions of that twiUght age. Directly the Gen tUe element began to regain its strength, and EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 197 rise up to the surface through Christianity — that moment an age of reUgious symbolism began, and Art seemed to assume a less beau tifully sensuous, but stlU a more thoughtful and noble aspect. Christ was then represented in many different forms, as the umpire at the games — the shepherd — the fisherman. The cross, the symbol of redemption, became the greatest of all the types; but the phoenix, the pea^ cock, the palm-branch, ship, the vine, were all initial letters of great aUegories. The fables of Meleager, Niobe, Cupid, and Psyche were re rived. Art, like a deserter, had left paganism and gone over to the new camp. From the Christian paintings in the catacombs of Calix tus, representing Christ as Orpheus of the Mys teries, as the Vine, and as the Shepherd — from .the frescoes and mosaics of Leo the Great and the Emperor MaximiUan — from Byzantine mis sals and apocalyptic visions — the real Christian art of Giotto sprang. From the time of Char lemagne downwards Art was kept Uke a dried flower, safe but crushed between the leaves of the illuminated gospels. The monks reproduced their Uttle world in miniature in their great 198 EPOCHS OF PAINTING. tomes, whose leaves were embalmed by the perpetual angel-breathing of incense. They copied flowers in crimson and azure — they traced out trees in gold^— they drew their enemies as de vils, the beautiful dream-faces of their freer days as angels, and thought that Art had reached its climax — the monks of Mount Athos still going on painting just as they did in the sixth century, or when Cimabue broke loose from their dungeon. They stIU preserve the same inflexible conventions, dark olive-green faces, stiff gold draperies — everything is done by rule, whether attitude, subject, or colour, according to the book of the monk Dionyslus which Di- dron discovered. # Brave men lived before Agamemnon; and there were painters beginning to think before John Cimabue (1240-1300.) Daybreak spreads quietly, it does not burst out like a volcano. Guido of Siena (1202-1258) began to break the mummy-wrappers, and strive for purer form and livelier colour. There is naivete in his Virgin at Siena, and the child Christ is graceful an- simple. The drapery is stUl frozen, and the hands long and stiff as glove-stretchers. The EPOCHS OP PAINTING. 199 thirteenth century was a great century; and a great century has great Art. The papacy was splendid and .triumphant under Innocent III. St. Francis had evangelized and revived religion by his great legalized heresy and Eeform — for in the Eoman church every good man has been a heretic or a reformer. The great sculptor, Pisano, was discovering the antique that was to quicken Christian art by the blood of the old pagan life. Edward III. was heading his outburst of chivalry; Chaucer was tuning for his song; Dante was suffering, that he might become immortal; Boccaccio was soon to be bom; the world was heaving with new thought; and Wickliff was anticipating the Eeformatlon. Into this troubled air Cimabue soared, happy and daring as an eagle that has broken its chain. There must have been a great fever and enthusiasm for the new Art, if the stories are true of the universal rejoicing, and clamorous procession of horsemen, with which his colossal Madonna was carried tb the Church of Sta. Maria Nb- vella, in Florence, where it still remains; and of the district in which he Uved being called the " Joyful Quarter," from the bell-ringing and 200 EPOCHS OF PAINTING. shouting when Charles of Anjou came to visit the painter. From Margaritone and Buffalmacco, of whom Vasari teUs us such quaint buffoon stories, we pass on to Giotto, the patriarch of Art, whom Cimabue found as a common shep herd boy, drawing a figure of one of his sheepy on a stone. Giotto had one of those great encyclopaedic minds of the middle ages, that ran through the whole circle of the sciences, and disdained the modern system of division of labour. He was a portrait-painter, for he left us the likeness of his friend Dante ; he was an architect, for he built that inlaid casket column of the CampanUe of Florence ; he was a worker in mosaics, for he wrought the Dis ciples in the Storm, now in the vestibule of St. Peter's; he was a sculptor, for he carved the Sta. Croce crucifix ; and a great religious painter, for he left us the Life of the Virgin, in the Arena chapel at Padua. He is hard, flat, and wanting in perspective and chiaro-oscuro ; his eyes are stUl almondy, and his figures stiff; his colour is pale, the carnations too faint and spiritually deUcate. His imagination, however, was boundless, and his com position almost modern in richness and depth: his, EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 201 groups are dramatic, and his incident and expression are taken froni great every-day nature. He ad mired aUegory as much as Dante did, for the age strove to impersonate and dramatize abstractions. Giotto loved reaUty with all his imagination, as much as Chaucer or Shakspere. In colour alone he was ascetic and mannered. When we look at his works, we can never be sure that we are not looking at some thought furnished to the painter by Dante. There can be no underrat ing the effect produced by this mouthpiece of the feelings of his age. He revolutionized Florence ; and his fame ran from Padua and Ve rona to Eome and Naples. He painted for Cle ment V. at Avignon ; and popes and kings, ab bots and priors, wrangled for his pictures. It was under very deep reUgious influence that Art, just released from its cave of the Seven Sleepers, worked so boldly, and with such unre pressed fire. Of one artist we are told that he always painted on his knees ; of another, that he received the sacrament before proceeding to his easel, which was itself an altar of sacrifice. We find others burning solemnly aU their pictures of nude subjects, at the bidding of a preaching friar. 202 EPOCHS OF PAINTING. They aU believed that St. Luke himself had been an artist ; and pictures of the Virgin by his holy hand were shown with exultation at innumerable monasteries. A picture of the Madonna, In the stiff Byzantine style, and painted on a panel of cypress-wood, is stiU shown as the work of the saint in the Church of Ara CoeU, at Florence, though it is probably the work of some Greek hermit of centuries later. But perhaps the most singular proof of the religious feeUng pf early Art is shown in the institution of the Florentine Com- pagnla, who met in the chapel of a hospital, given to them by the Portinari famUy. In this factious and divided age, when tongues are smooth above and thick slab with poison below— when competi tion Is so greedy, ruthless, cruel, and envious — it surprises us to read in Vasari of this apostolic club, so impossible in these days, that, uniting the old Greek and the new Cimabue men, held meet ings to return thanks to God for the spread of Art, and to tender each other assistance at all times and for all needs. Fancy the forty E.A.'s meeting the Hogarth Club, and chanting the an them, " ' Tis lihe the precious ointment," &c. But everything was healthy, vigorous, and true about EPOCHS OP PAINTING. 203 this new Art, now conscious for the first time of its greatness and power. In Florence there were self-protecting guUds of painters — a sure sign of growth. Cennino Cennini, pupil of one of the Gaddis, wrote a treatise on painting, which was, in fact, a code built up from scattered practices and traditions. Piero deUa Francesca's treatise on perspective, and Masolino's knowledge of light and shade, enabled Masaccio (who foUowed Angelico, 1402- 1443J to individualize and dramatize form, and to carry Art far beyond Giotto's high-water mark. In some respects the mechanism of Art all but reached its culminating point in Masaccio and his wild scholar Fra Lippi. In his Ufetlme, too, Fra Angelico, brooding in his cell, carried spiritualism further, though disregarding that purity and ac tuality of the beautiful in form that Ghlberti of the Gates and DonateUo his contemporary had developed. Grown-up men could not copy the stiff, flat imaginings of Giotto; but Eaphael him self worked upon the old Masaccio themes, with sometimes the Masaccio manner. His influence ran through all the Eoman school, affecting their composition and design, in spite even of Michael 204 EPOCHS OP PAINTING. Angelo and Da Vinci ; and, not many years ago, one of our own young painters plagiarised, with success, from one of Masacclo's , most celebrated designs. Masacclo's Chapel of the Brancacci, in the Church del Carmine at Florence, be^ came the school-room of a long generation of painters. Eaphael copied his Adam and Eve, and Fra BartholPmeo his Madonna and child. Now, when we come to sum up what Masaccio did for Art, we see that he stretched its horizon degrees further Into the unknown country. The Medici of Florence were not to be satisfied vrith the cold purity of Giotto : they wanted more truth and human nature ; they caUed for more il lusion, and wondered a picture could not equal a statue. Masaccio modelled and rounded his fi gures till they grew out of the canvas : he gave up the pinched stiff robes, and gave broad, billowy masses and grand rolUng Unes. He made the drapery express the form, and the form beautiful for itself, not merely for the religious idea it ex pressed. In fact. Art had come back to the old Pagan truth, that the human body In perfection was the most beautiful of aU things, and the very centre column of the world. The study of sculp EPOCHS OP PAINTING. 205 ture, in fact, was making the Italian what he has ever since been — a good draughtsman. The cen tury's eye, by constantly watching with careful love the outline of things, had educated itself, and Masaccio was the result. Fra Lippi, that wild painter, who deserted his convent, was made a slave of in Barbary, carried off a nun from a convent, and eventually died of poison, gave a certain Flemish tendency to Art, a sensual grace, a reaUstic ardent grandeur, that has, inhis figure of St. Paul, a large feeling, which antici pates Michael Angelo. He introduced boors and sharpers into his religious pictures occasionally, and sometimes gave his saints and angels rather a sly and cunning look. Hefirstfreelyintroduced the mo dem Florentine dress, a convention that was some centuries in dying out, and of which the Dutch picture, in which Abraham Is clapping a tremen dous beU-mouthed blunderbuss to the ear of Isaac, is perhaps the most outrageous example. It is in the works of Sandro Botticelli, the vehement poet, who taught Fra Lippi's son, that we first find Art altogether leaving the convent and plunging into the dangerous Armida gardens of old mytho-. logy. 206 EPOCHS OF PAINTING. Savanarola would, we daresay, gladly have burnt that deUcious little picture now in the Ufizii at Florence, which represents a naked Venus floating on a shell, driven to the shore through a shower of roses, and a nymph, under a laurel bush, holding out a puffing crimson mantle to receive the goddess. But now a new discovery burst Uke a sunrise upon Art, which already to many seemed perfect. It was to Art what printing was to letters : it rendered the repetition of a great work easier, and its destruction more impossible ; it drew Art away from mere church frescoes, and sent it Into palaces and cabinets ; it rendered it more within reach of single fortunes ; it came at a time when Art was getting colder in the service of a superstitious faith, and longing for new and less restrictive patrons. Previously to the Flemish Van Eycks' discovery of how to dissolve amber in drying oil, every one had painted in distemper with yolk of egg, which dried quickly and forbade much finish. With tempera Art was necessarily hard, quick, and con ventional ; there could be no rivalry of the exter nal world. Distemper was paler and more perish able than oil. The secret, as a doubtful legend EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 207 runs, was brought from the Netherlands by Anto- nello da Messina, who confided it to his friend Domenico Veneziano, who was murdered by An drea de Castagno, who longed to be without a rival. Now, although the Van Eycks never kept the discovery a secret, it is certain that Andrea's manner was a hard and meagre one ; vvhile the one extant work of Domenico's shows the artist's character to have been gentle and noble, which suits the story. But before we come to the great epoch which produced Andrea Verocchio, Leonardo's master — Ghirlandajo, Michael Angelo's master — and Peru gino, Eaphael's master, let us give a word to that great, impetuous genius, Luca SignorelU, a fiery soul, who had studied every school, and whose figures bear down on us Uke a charge of ca valry. He was the direct forerunner of Michael Angelo, and his men are gods. He carried fore-, shortening to new heights, and was a Columbus in Art, preferring naked figures, and drawing them. vrith pure antique power and force. His colour has a stern gloom about it ; and in aU Art we know of nothing so Dantesque and terrible as the, " Fulminati, or Destruction of the Wicked," from 208 EPOCHS OP PAINTING. the cathedral at Orrieto. The terrible rushing out and trample of the figures through the great Domdanlel gateway of heaven is as tremendous as anything in the Slstlne chapel. How dreadful are the wretches with bound hands, sinking back wards through floods of darkness, plunging down, down — deeper than ever plummet sounded — from darkness to darkness ! Mantegna's pedantic, pinched-up antique figures, with their smaU heads, and Perugino's gloomy hardness and mannered rapture, we pass over, not so much that they are uninteresting, as in haste to get to BelUni, the patriarch of that Venetian school, with which we English have always had so strong a sympathy, and from which we have learnt so much. The Venetian painters were always fond of colour, as we have been. Their style had always a little of the commercial element of luxury in it. The Ve netians had always a tendency to portrait and conversational pieces ; they had not the pedantic dravring of Padua, nor the historic style of Flo rence, the daring of SignorelU, or the spirituaUty of Fra AngeUco. Eastern models were common in Venice ; Eastern stuffs blazed in the windows ; EPOCHS OP PAINTING. 209 they had sea atmosphere, liberal arid numerous patrons, historical tradition, and a picturesque city. From the beginning Bellini's colour was of a jeweUed depth and richness ; a twiUght splendour, not so natural as his pupil Titian's, but even more rejoicing. And now about^ this time, just as oil, when it was wanted, rose to the surface and displaced the more limited and less practical distemper, engraving — the chance discovery -of a Florentine goldsmith — arose to disseminate and perpetuate the growing art. With Francia, the quattro-cento painters end.' Of this painter's grace and earnest tenderness of passion, the " Dead Christ " in our National GaUery is a fine example. Beauty and dignity were ever at his easel ; and even in his crudeness there is a simple charm. The legend goes that he died of a broken heart at the success of Eaphael; but hearts sixty-seven years old are generally rather too leathery to break. The cinque-cento ideal was not the quattro cento ideal. The new men were half-religious, half-material. They were, in fact, Mr. Euskin's horror, Eenaissance-men, now painting from the Old Testament, now from Ovid; now ApoUo VOL. II. P 210 EPOCHS OF PAINTING, sawing on a fiddle, now Isaiah fiddling with a saw. The last century attained to individuality of form ; the present refine upon that know ledge, adding to perfect form perfect colour; to the ideal selection of form, both dramatic composition, and light and shade. Of the higher developments of the new ideal Eaphael and Michael Angelo are the types ; of the mediators between the two centuries, Fra Bartolomeo and , Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo, the son of the Florentine govern ment notary, was perhaps one of the greatest Eclectics that ever lived. He was all but om niscient: he was a great mathematician and mUitary engineer ; a sculptor, painter, poet, and musician ; a master of botany and anatomy ; a gunsmith and ship-builder. Yet he has been one of the great unfortunate men ; for hia "Last Supper" exists only in copies — and we aU know what copies are — and his great cartoon of the "Victory of Picinino^' exists only in Eubens' coarse copy of some half - dozen tumbling figures ; while Michael Angelo's rival cartoon of " Pisa " is preserved by accurate and careful engraving. His life was a troubled one; for EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 211 Charles XII. drove him from MUan; jealousy of Michael Angelo drove him from Leo X. and Eome; and just as his great period of patron age began under Francis I., Death caUed him, and he could not refuse to go. As for Fra Bartolomeo, who first introduced our old friend the lay-figure, he was an aUy of Eaphael, and imitated. Da Vinci. He is one of those grand averages that no one can praise too much; and in no case (and this is a hint for amateurs) is injudicious praise safer. Michael Angelo, the stalwart son of a Tuscan gentleman, was twelve years old when Eaphael, the son of the painter of Urbino, was born. Eaphael v?as the strongest in gentleness; Buo narotti the strongest in strength. The one was the fiery St. Peter, the other the loving St. John of Christian art. The Virgin's motherly love was the ideal of the one; the other, in his " Last Judgment," shuns Heaven, and seems more at home vrith the agony and writhing of the Devil. The one craved for ideal purity and beauty of form ; the other, muscular strength : the one would have executed «the Venus ; the other, the Hercules of antiquity. Buonarotti p2 212; EPOCHS OP PAINTING. was strong and passionate; Eaphael was lovely and belpved by every one. " O happy and blessed spirit!" bursts out; Vasari, half In tears as he speaks of, him. ^The V^^'g^*^ ^^ pa,inted are so innumerable that they are known by special marksT— as , the pink, the goldfinch, the oak, , the napkin, the cat, the fish, the seat, the chair, the- canopy, the curtain, the diadem, &c. He could never rea,ch his ideal of maternal and divine love, yet he never repeated himself: his colour, though often deep, and rich, as in the Madon,na of the Seat at Florence, was never paramount. In portrait, Titian surpassed him ; in sublimity and cyclopic power he was inferior to Michael Angelo ,; in dravring he approached, but never rIvaUed the antique ; in variety, Eubens equaUed him; and in finish, the Dutch men go beyond him. Yet in grasp and width Eaphael stands alone : his groups of pictures in the Vatican were epical in their compass. That he should have modified his manner after seeing Michael Angelo, is perhaps a sign of confessed inferiority; or, was it rather a proof of Buona- rotti's incapabUity of growth? We regard it as the special mark of greatness. EPOCHS OP PAINTING. 213 in Eaphael's mirid, that Michael Angelo did not show — it was always growing, always improving; his last work was his best. Eaphael studied the cartoon of "Pisa" till he grew out of the severity of Perugino; and when he had seen the " Last Judgment," he*agaln modified his style. Michael Angelo always was in a rage with his work, and was always straining. His men are Titans, his women men, his children small giants — his creatures' muscles grow through their skin. His figures are painted statues — they are sublime ; but It Is just because they are always sublime that they weary us. One might be friends with an acrobat, but one would not like him to be always supporting three men on his chin. There is a brag of strength about Michael Angelo, which is buUying; there is a religious sentiment about Eaphael, which is often monotonous. Michael Angelo is Intellect, says Mr. Wornum, and Eaphael sentiment. It is like the old scholastic distinction between the cherubim and the seraphim -^the one knevv more, the other loved more. Look at the portraits — the beardless, seraphic face of the one, with the longing eyes and the flowing hair; the other a 214 EPOCHS OP PAINTING. struggling fuU face, wide broken nose, strong mouth, crispy hair, and curly beard. Eemember, too, in judging of their rival fames, that Buona rotti lived nearly three times as long as the genius of Urbino ; and on the other hand, that Michael AngMo's best work has all but perished. Correggio and Parmegiano led the Lombard school to a beautiful but lower ideal than that of the Eoman and Florentine schools. They sought not so much the form and expression of Eome, the colour of Venice, or the leaming of Padua, or the humble poetry of Flanders. Art grew more Pagan, sensuous, and more volup tuous ; sensibility and the power of loving were Corregglo's gift, but his tenderness and aspira tions were more low and human than those of Eaphael. Love and pleasure, the happiness of childhood, he rejoices in, and expresses with the softest interweaving of light and shade. Of his great works, the "Assumption of the Vir gin," in the cupola of Parma, is the greatest; and in this he triumphs in aU the compUcations of foreshortening. There is a little picture by this painter, with a white rabbit in it, at Naples, EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 215 which is a deUcious masterpiece of this lovable master. Titian, never daring In drawing, or very subtle in composition, is the great emperor of colour, of simple grandeur, and of what Eeynolds calls "senatorial dignity." Titian glorified life; and ¦his nobles are lapped in a calm, great-minded serenity, such as the abstract statesman and phi losopher should wear at the end of life, but does not. He is too grave to excel much in action or in the grapple of passion. In his " Peter the Martyr " he seems to attain a pow erful excellence, which promises even higher things. But stUl the siren. Colour, was the Cleopatra for which Titian lost the empire of art, and was content to lose it. He was the greatest man who ever condescended to paint portraits. Beside his old Venetians, as Kiigler cleverly says, aU modern gentlemen look poor and small. This is no proof, however, of our mental inferiority to those gentlemen, but of our mental inferiority to Titian. In the glorious backgrounds, too, taken from his own FriuU mountains, we must not forget that Titian founded modern landscape. Titian moved a 216 EPOCHS OP PAINTING. king among men. He knew Ariosto ; Michael Angelo came to see him paint. The Pope in vited him to Eome, Charles V, to Augsburg. But this image of gold had clay feet ; he strove to impress no moral fact; he aimed neither at ideal form, expression, nor beauty. His god was- Colour, and before that beautiful idol he laid -down his genius and his life. It is almost a proof of his defects, to find that the weakest parts of his mind were the first to decay. His last work Is gorgeous in colour, but is feeble in drawing, and staggering and uncertain in com position. On the early German schools it is not necessary to dUate. In truth, German art, but for a missal-painter here and there, was late In flowering ; though in a romance of the thirteenth century, the writer describes Sir Percival in so goodly a mass of blazing steel on horseback, that no painter of either Cologne or Maestricht could have coloured anything half so fair. In the quaint, simple, old German books, so delicious and hoinely in their naivete, there are mentions of Master WUUam and Master Stephen, who grayed and thought over their diptychs, or those EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 217 quaint altar-pieces that open like shutters : they are generally highly-finished tempera paintings on gilded panels; their heads grave and noble, but the drawing, especiaUy of the extremities, weak and faltering. The scenes are occa sionally complicated, but no more resembling the real passionate drama of the later schools than the rough religious comedy of the mystery plays did the stage of Garrick or of Kean. There was nothing, indeed, specially great in the patient naive school of German art, tiU the two brothers Van Eyck astonished Bruges by discovering oil-painting. The examples at the National GaUeries are just sufficient to show us .what the Van Eycks were, with their simple, timid composition, slow careful detail, never since surpassed, hard cutting outline, and stiff angular drapery. Who can forget the delicious lucidness of their colour, the wonder of patient finish. Inexhaustible to tra,vel over with the eye, and the biUowy scarlet of that curious head-dress, that leads us on in thought to Mabuse, Lucas, Van Leyden, and the black smith Mafsys? Mabuse was in Henry VII.'s court ' what Holbein was in Henry Vlll.'a, 218 EPOCHS OP PAINTING. Vandyck in Charles I.'s, Lely in Charles II.'s, and Kneller in WUliam of Orange's. Look carefully into the round globular mirror in that National GaUery picture of Van Eyck — peer well into its luminous darkness, disre garding the diamond-cut reflection of window and chandelier, and you will see, at certain magic moments, all German art reflected in its round, as In a little world. German art never was led aside by the siren of the ideal : and from it distinctly, with certain side in fluences from Greece and Italy, all that is real in EngUsh art springs. We see Hogarth in Holbein ; in , his searching truth, austere confession of the vanity of life, and the brittle- ness of its illusions, in his stem ghastliness and almost sardonic humour. The great Albert Durer, the son of the Nuremberg goldsmith, was, like Hogarth, an engraver ; and, as in the English painter's case, his enemies sought to depreciate his painting by praising his engraving. His mysticism and mannerism still reign over German art, just as Hogarth's influence reigns over us, being as traceable in Frith as in the last young painter EPOCHS OF PAINTING. ^ 219 of a street scene. The wild northern fancy which, in the middle ages, sported in the stone lily flower and grotesque figures of cathe dral capitals, lashed out in German painting in such visions as Van Eyck's " HeU," teem ing with devils, HemUng's apocalyptic dream, and Jerome Bosch's purgatorial whirlpools. Durer was another of the great encyclopasdic pioneer minds of Art ; he was at once sculptor, en graver, painter, and architect. His fingers took m the whole key-board at once. He was hundred-fingered as a Thalberg, or a Listz. He was solemn and tender, at once a poet and a mathematician ; yet his drapery was pinched and petty, his drawing often archaic, his expression painful and mannered, his colour fluctuating and uncertain, Durer expressed the chivalry of the Maximinian age, and the re ligion of the Erasmian time. His pictures are comments on the history of the Eeformatlon. Occasionally, Durer developed in his works all the weird imagination and mysticism of his country. We see hidden under the colours, Eichter, Gothe, and Fouqud. "Melancholy and the Knight," " Death and the Devil," are as 220 EPOCHS OF PAINTING. poetical fancies as the romantic school has produced. A large head of Christ we have seen from his hand is grander than Eaphael, and perfectly Phidian in its royal sweep of power. Yet, strange and humiliating contrast, Durer was a henpecked husband ! On the decUne of Art whom shall we hear? There are the imbecile, persisting in their cry that patronage creates Art, and that Art-decay is therefore attributable to a Dutchman becoming Pope, to the dispersion of the school of Eaphael, to the sack of Eome. The decay was really the languor after a fever — the ebb after the flow — the weariness after the exertion. Now come hopeless Zuccheri, dull Del Sarto, Imitative Piombo, mediocre Vasari — hard at work painting naked dissections and bumpy prize-fighters, with the delusion that they were imitating Michael ' Angelo. The Caracci, at the Bolognal school, indeed established a code of laws for success ful Imitation. In a celebrated sonnet, Agos- tlno Caracci, incapable of originality, advises the clever student to unite the colour of Lom bardy with the drawing of Eome, the chiaro-oscuro of Venice, the truth of Titian, the terror of EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 221 Michael Angelo, the symmetry of Eaphael, the grace of Parmegiano, the invention of Prima ticcio, and the purity of Coreggio. We need scarcely repeat what Mr. Euskin, the AchUles who tries so fiercely to storm the Academic Troy, has so often said on the degradation of this miserable school of Art, which your true pedantic Eclectic condemns so gently. Its twilight eclipse of sunshine, its insincere and meretricious religion, the pale neutrality of its colours, the absence of all power, purity, and originality, every loaded London sale-room de monstrates. Unlucky was it for English art that Eeynolds, who had early and fatally studied that poor sentimentalist Guercino, did not see the evil of this dangeroris school. Eclectic art might have, been great but for its turning imitative, and pandering to the wants of a less religious and more luxurious age. The Eclectics tried to unite impossibUities : they wanted at once the finish of Pope and the fire of Dryden — ^the grandeur of Homer and the refinement of Virgil. They were essentially tame, imitative pedants. Nature amid their rules was forgotten. They had so much to observe in 222 EPOCHS OF PAINTING, pictures of dead men, that they had no time to go out and observe living nature; so they painted dead pictures, and wUl be forgotten and despised as they deserved. Yet, even down among these dead Idealists, from mere weight of brain arose some great chiefs : Annibale Caracci, for instance, though often tame and conventional; Domeni chino, cold and unimaginative, though sometimes pure and grand ; Guido and Albani, graceful and elegant, but often mere mannered manufacturers. No wonder then that, sudden and violent as a storm, broke out in volcanic. Irritable Naples, the new and rival school of the Naturalistl. From this repulsive school, after many filterings, our EngUsh art has drawn many of its inspirations; though it is difficult to see Ward's French scenes in the strong, yellow Ughts and black darknesses of the mason Caravaggio and the Spanish mur derer Elbera. Wander out of the irritable heat of a NeapoUtan day in the coolness of the National Museum at Naples, and shudder at the revolting slaughter and the loathsome ruffians. These Na turalistl, sick of the platitudes of the Caracci (the tailor's sonsj, loved to paint, dagger in hand. If EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 223 devils ever painted, here are their works. What sensual, thievish, suffering faces! — what purga torial scenes of Human wrath and violence ! — aU pointing to Eibera dying poor and unknown, and to Caravaggio expiring of rage and broken-hearted at one of the gates of Eome. Not waiting to notice the vulgar boldness of Lanfranco, and the plastered insipidity of San Ferrate, Carlo Maratti, and Carlo Dolce, we come to Eubens, who springs indirectly from the Naturalistl, borrovring their sensual colour, daylight colour, and truthful but coarse drawing. Motion, vigour, and colour were the Fleming's special gift: as Fuseli says, his figures sweep by you In a " gulf of colours." Often redundant, often vulgar, Eubens was the florid genius of the Eenaissance. His energy is boisterous, and his talent turns too often to a sort of decorative flood of fancy without motive. Mythology and Scripture, aU Christian and Pagan tradition and creed, Eubens ransacked and dis- tUled Into gold, fiUing vrith their revived visions halls, palaces, and churches. He paints like a king, and from his school great painters went forth to rule over newly-discovered countries and 224 ' EPOCHS OP PAINTING. newly-conquered provinces, Uke proconsuls from the throne of the Caesar. In portrait-painting, in which Eaphael, and indeed aU the old masters, attained certain tri umphs, Vandyck rivalled Titian, Giorgione, and Del Piombo. He is more flimsy, and less deep and thoughtful ; he has less fbrce, and Is some times cold, flat, or feeble. Vandyck has ground into us a deep conviction that the Charles the First's nobles he painted were the most perfect gentlemen who ever Uved. The self-respect, the quiet, easy, and almost playful dignity of those cavaliers of his, in their buff and blue, has never been surpassed. The painting is not Impatiently strong, but almost feminine in its subtle delicacy.' Our Gainsborough (except in his strongest pic ture — " The Blue Boy," and his bewitching queen of womanhood^ — " Mrs. Graham,") is a mere flimsy dilution of Vandyck, his great model, as far as Ught and shade, and the struc tural power of modeUIng go. Pure dayUght has only just begun tp be painted by our P.E.B.'s^ whose trick of red hair, protruding chins, and small salad vegetation, has hitherto, with aU their talent, so grievously deluded the Art-world of aU EPOCHS OP PAINTING. 225 studio dim conventional light, once thought indls pensable to Art. Eembrandt's is the most arti ficial and the mPst delicious : in his system of a centre light, rendered a jewel of value by a surrounding ocean of harmonious and semi-transparent darkness, Eembrandt has never been surpassed. Da Vinci could round a limb as well, Correggio track the softest shadow over its surface into every curve and dimple, but the miUer's son alone hurls his sunbeam at the buU's- eye of his picture, and fixes it there like the burning arrow of Virgil, He smeared his oU over a golden ground, says Hazlitt ; he was the most vulgar of draughtsmen, the most ideal of colour ists. His ideal colour has delighted generations, but it never produced a successful Imitator ; and if it had, he must have been a ruined man, for nature is not Eembrandtish, except in cellars and other exceptional places. No doubt, however, in roughly laughing at the ideal, like Hogarth, he did in his day much good ; and he at least added to the palace of Art one beautiful though dark chamber. But we must leave Dutch art — Gerard Dow, vrith his needle brushes, and Teniers with his acute sUveriness, Backhuysen with his gray VOL. II. Q 226 EPOCHS OF PAINTING, skies and rough seas, and Both vrith his spotty lights, &c. For Spanish art, we could IU afford to for get Murillo's religious sentiments, and Eibera's fanatic violence ; Cano's purity, and the painter- like dash of Velasquez, While from the begin ning French art has been stiffly classical. The great outburst of national enthusiasm in the time of the Consulate redeemed it in some degree from the theatrical grace of Watteau, and the vapid voluptuousness of Vanloo and Bordone, Poor Leopold Eobert devoted himself to de scribing on canvas modern life in Italy, its con trast and romance, Greuze, before this, had opened the way to modem French sentiment, Gericault's " Medusa Wreck," though hideous as carrion in colour, in 1819, led the French art, by its passionate dramatic action and situation, painful almost to melodrama, to the modem romantic school of subjects, in which Delaroche (Gros's pupil) attained such triumphs, Less facile, vigorous, and dashing than Vernet, he excels him in dramatic Intensity, particularly In his " Death of the Due de Guise ;" his " Crossing the Alps" is a singular contrast with the same subject as EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 227 painted by David. Genre pictures, like thia and " The Duel of Gerome," show that genre may be the highest art ; for, though the true definition of high art is the highest rendering of the highest subject, we can all see that a mean thing treated highly is higher than a high thing treated meanly. For instance, a plum, painted by William Hunt, is higher art than a Christ enter ing Jerusalem daubed by Haydon, With Hogarth began English painting. He, the poor engraver's apprentice, has left us a won derful panorama of Walpole's age. He first really tried to paint the novel — to produce the stage on canvas. Wholesome art — but whether pleasing or not, the sturdy little man did not much care. At the same time, Wilson rose up to found idealized landscape; which Gainsborough, in a brown, skirmishing way, full of grace and feeling, but careless and sketchy in man ner, carried much further, by confining him self to English landscapes which no one would buy. Then came Eeynolds, to lay down critical laws for us, and to prove that, a great English portrait-painter might exist, who could unite the solidity of Titian to the grace of Q2 228 EPOCHS OP PAINTING. Vandyck, As for poor tame West — industrious enough, and lucky enough, but no genius — he too helped to break the swaddling-bands from young Art ; for he had the courage, in his "Death of Wolfe," to paint that general in a taU-coat, and not in a toga, Fuseli showed us the capers and gymnastics of Art; and Opie lent us some coarse power and violent expression. Poor wrong-headed Barry split on the same rock as did Haydon afterwards. Believing the sublime must necessarily be the large, he for got that the large is not necessarUy the sub lime. But after all, vrith all our struggles and hopes, we must not forget that: it is in the Dutch school, headed by Hogarth as a satirist and teacher, and WUkie as a story- teUer and sketcher, that our nation has hitherto chiefly exceUed. Large pictures vrill not seU, and classical pictures will not sell. We have no room for them : the mercantile world do not know the classics, and do not understand the pictures. There are no longer rich monasteries to buy large pictures, and in our churches they are forbidden. But though, ceteris •paribus; EPOCHS OF PAINTING. 229 a smaU picture never can be so sublime as a large one-^size being one of the most obvious and best-known elements of the sublime — the largest mind may find room to exercise its enchantment almost as well in a smaU volume as in an epic. There is no fear of the can vas being too small, if the mind is only large enough; We have riot yet met with many minds too large for their canvas. We have met a great many too small. In landscape, from some old Saxon early love, the EngUsh have always exceUed on paper and on canvas. On paper, too, in a double sense, for water-colours are an English invention : and an English triumph, from the early days of Sandby and Varley to those bf the great autocrat of colour — Turner him self. Seascapes we have always produced, and always purchased eagerly. We are still makitg discoveries in the shape and grouping of skies and leaves. Nor can we conclude without noticing the P.E.B.'s, those chUdren of the last heresy of English art, that latest development of change in the English school. Like aU heresies, we 230 EPOCHS OP PAINTING; consider it as a sign of a want, and at the same time of an abuse which needs correction; all that is good in it wiU live, all that is bad we hope wIU pass away into the grave of bygone Academicism and Eclecticism. It sprang from the German ascetic revival of CorneUus and his crew, and came to us wrapped in the white stole of Puginism. It originated, no doubt, in that Gothic renais sance which Wordsworth began, leading us back to truth, through ultra, and at first rather caricatured, simplicity. It began with splay feet, hideous worn faces, red hair, corduroys, vegetable peculiarities, crimson sheep, worsted-work clouds, and other exceptionable oddities. In its love of chivalry and eccle siastical romance of a past time, Pre-Eaphae- litlsm is Tennysonian. If it points anywhere it seems to point, in its cleverest representa tives. Ford, Maddox Brown, Millais, Eosetti, and Holman Hunt, to a sort of semi- Venetian school, with the sentiment of modern poetry iUustrated by a Veroriese and Giorgione type of colour. At present, in its weaker repre sentatives, it tends to, a tinted stained-glass EPOCHS OP PAINTING. 231 style, in which surface colour is attained at the expense of soundness and solidity. As for their painful finish, we need not much fear it; for, at that peculiar stage of success, when the painter turns manufacturer, all this will be cast off as a slough, and the race of rising P.E.B.'s wiU soon learn, when they once get out of the hot air of cUque flattery, that the great public have no sympathy now fof knights in gilded maU, in mystic ladies of Shalotte, in nuns digging graves, or in melan choly princesses sitting at twiUght windows, with golden cushions ou their laps : they will find that aU that antiquarian frippery suits only the drawing-room and the student race, not the wide corduroy world. The large world want the old heart-ache painted ; mothers parting from chUdren, death-beds, lovers join ing hands, and aU the old humours and pas sions of the abstract man. A great picture should translate into every language, and re quire no book-comment to eke out its meaning. Pre-EaphaeUtisim, if it died to-morrow, has, however, given us, through Mr. MiUals, de- 232 EPOCHS OF PAINTING. lightful imaginations ; through Mr. Eosetti, exquirite sketches; through Mr. Holman Hunt, a truly great picture. 233 CHAPTEE X. GREEK ART. In a gallery of Greek statues, vrith no toil at Universities, no i slow scholastic steps, you may bring mature inteUects to realize the mytholpgy of a people who seemed, unlike aU other nations, to care little about truth, or what meaning lay within the myth they taught, so it were beautiful In form and radiant with poetry. If Jove was degraded Into mortal shape he was also the deity at whose frown earth shook to its centre, the shepherd of the laggiug clouds, the ruler of men, the friend of kings, the majestic being in whom the past, the pre sent, and the future were centred. If Pan was lewd and earthly, he loved Syrinx, and carved 234 GREEK ART. green pipes, to pipe to the memory of the transformed maiden. AU nature had its ani mating spirits to their eye, and they cared little for external nature, unless it could be seen through Idealizations of the human form. Their poets do not dwell on the rushing river, hur rying on with aU the aspirations and eager avidity of eternal youth, never resting, never ceasing, its wUd aim never fulfiUed, yet its Impetuous longing never-ending, the eternity of motion, the impenetrability of unattainable craving; but with them it is the froUc dance of the white armed nymphs, who bear off the beautiful youth Hylas, as he stoops down to the stream brink to fill his vase, whUe the shout of the warring Hercules is heard over the distant mountain. Sophocles has a word or two for the sorrowing nightingale, and Plato for the shady plane-tree, and the murmuring lUyssus ; but a page of Keats contains more sensuous appreciation of external nature than can be found in all the volumes from Sappho to Theo critus. If they looked up at a mountain, it was to see Mercury new lighted on its sum mit. If they stayed to smeU the blossoms of GREEK ARTi 235 the rineyards, it was to look around, fearfuUy dreaming of nestling fairies and Bacchantes sleeping in the green and golden shadows. Through the storm the seamen round the Sym- plegades heard the hoarse trumpets of the Tritons, or a distant sun-gleam showed them Amphi- trlte sinking slowly through the wave; and when the Grecian rower leant wearily over the taffrail of the gaUeys of Themiatocles or Phocion, it was to spy through the semi-trans parent depths the nymphs Ufting up their broad tapestries of seaweed, that they might sink a thousand fathoms down to the coral chambers of the sea-king Neptune. The rainbow was alive to them with winged shapes ; in the moon Ught they saw spirits descending to entrance the shepherds sleeping on the mountains. Hea ven in their mind was so entwined and in termarried with earth, tha|; the one had become a mere vestibule of the other. All nature appeared but as a background to the human form. We, perhaps, make the human form too much what a landscape painter does his figures ; for our poets are landscape painters, and in our landscapes the human species dwin 236 GREEK ART. dies down tp less importance than a bunch of dock leaves, or an old post. If we have gained by the boundless pleasures that the contemplation of Nature presents, we have lost by sacrificing our appreciation of the naked figure, — and modem dress has been the death of sculpture. The Greeks, then, with their human mytho logy, in which the gods were not things apart from men, but only men vrith higher power, threw their whole genius upon realizing this humble ideal, and accompUshed it. We say humble ideal, because the abstraction of beauty, however difficult to realize, must be less diffi cult than the mysteries of man's redemption, or the glories and horrors of a future state. In the Venus de Medici we have the most perfect conception of pure female beauty, apart from inteUect, that ever has, or perhaps ever can be, attained. In Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment," we have but faint shadowings of the greatest event that our reUgibn foreteUs; and yet it is higher in degree than the Grecian work ; and though it deals vrith things not a whit more true than the Greek abstract, GREEK ARTi 237 which is a truth of the human mirid Inde pendent of aU' religion, is infinitely more im pressive and more subUme. The Greek statue may have some irradiation of an angel's beauty, but the Florentine canvas is gloomed with the soot and blackness of the mouth of Hell, and lit by the splendour of fhe Gates of Heaven. Eome, Naples, Florence, Paris, and even the cities of Germany, have each- in turn con tributed to the aggrandisement of Art. Pope, king, cardinal, and duke, have aU given tribute; the spoilers have rendered up their spoil; the magi have strewn their treasures. Art, is not only Greek — ^Venus is now at the loom; Diana amongst the spindles; Mars works at a boUer; Mercury teaches at a ragged school, and VuIt can looks grimy as a stoker. Yet, In all these orbits, among the roar, and gush, and hiss, and the rattle, din, and pounding of shop and work room, the eternal types of possible beauty vrill soothe and elevate, and be as angel dreams and whispers of hope and perfection. The minds that wrought the great works of Greek art may have been ambitious, restless, and fickle, but they could not have been gross or brutal. 238 GREEK ART. Immured within lies the Greek spirit — the spirit of Homer and of ,^schylus, of Sophocles and Plato. In that gambolling foam is something of the spirit of Aristophanes ; the jests of Hie- rocles are not aU dead, whUe that satyr's mask still gapes wide. Dead Mars and buried Mercury are as potent over us as the saints vve worshipped not 300 years since. They recall more delicious visions, are surrounded by a brighter halo, are embalmed In our memories, and dwell in a recess of it, oftener visited, and more honoured; they are obsolete coin, it is true, not known In the market-place or the theatre, but still true buUion, and worth its weight at the changer's; not current coin, miUed and glittering, but precious ore all the same, and from a mine as high and deep. Poets do more to perpetuate false faiths than whole generations of priestly hier archies and lying oracles uttering what is not. A temple may be shattered, but the poem is immortal. The pagan lie is a great bird of prey, and dominates over the country for a time, till some new and purer faith comes like a Hercules, and transfixes it with his dart. But ©REEK ART, 239 poems are butterflies, too numerous and too smaU for his shafts; they come In flocks Uke sparrows, and nestle under your- eaves, and build in your chamber, and no fowler may wring their necks, or string them to his girdle ; but the poem perpetuates, after all, only what is true — the Beautiful that lives because it deserves to Uve, and is itself a truth. These statues were to the early Christians the hateful images of detestable idols. Their paganism has long died out of them, for us; they are not now branches of an entangled forest of poisoned upases, where no sunbeam might enter — but rather dead leaves, lying at our feet, still ribbed and curiously veined, and bright with the unfading colours, not of their autumn, but of their perennial spring. As we contemplate the triumphs of Greek art, the mind, dazzled and drunk with beauty, is carried t)ack involuntarily into the remoter past, into other regions and forms of life, and modes of thought, no longer extant. Amongst such visions as these Uved men whose errors we perhaps stUl share in, and whose virtues we have still to reach. These were the great mas- 240 GREEK ART. ters in those realms of thought where we are now leaming the ABC. Such were the opponents of the Persian, the conquerors at Marathon, the men whose red blood rained out at Thermopylje, or dyed the sea of Sala mis. Here Uved the men who threw the sheU into the urn against Aristides, and who porired out the green juice for Socrates ; who trod the desert with Alexander, and who shouted "Thalatta" with Xenophon. A race that left some traces behind them of their existence, perhaps in the eyes of the divinity almost as admirable as steam-engines or raUways; another walk of mind, but not an inferior one, dealing more with the mind than the body, less the result of concentrated instincts and accumulative observation, but not less tendirig to the world's progress. We have long since left the Doric temple of the Corinthian doorway, but we stUl look back wistfully, uncertain whether we have been advancing, or merely going round and round; our position is a fresh one, but not much nearer to the goal of human aspira tion. What themes for speculation are these Eot GREEK ART. 241 man and Gi-eek works ! — companions of the Caasars and tenants of Athenian teniples I Two empires have , passed away, merely to fumish us with objects of wonder and de light ! Men have thought, and toiled, and bled, and fought, and wept, and suffered, to fill the Art-haUs of England with these reproductions of their toil, passed away as the Antediluvian monsters before man. I wot, as the stones of our pavements are full of the shells of dead creatures, so is the present built upon the past. We walk upon roads covered with pounded altars of the Druids; the walls of Eoman fortresses are buUt in our church towers ; we ourselves shaU pave the path of the future. WiU sculpture ever revive? The marble cliffs of the Cyclades stUl glitter over that blue JEgean which the gUded oars of the Per sian Satraps beat into foam. There is stiU stone to be hewn at Pares; the bee of Hy- mettus feeds upon the purple thyme, whose roots are twining over uncarved statues. Un- shapen Venuses sleep silent in the quarries of PenteUcus, ready to awaken when genius utters VOL. II. R 242 GREEK ART. the talismanic word ; the mould of the Apollo, still unbroken, lurks half covered by the acanthus, in some green comer of the world. Let but genius arise from the dead, and the mute stone, too, wiU start to life. From this pavement might be chiselled forms as fair as ever poet dreamed of; there is gold enough to coin vrith, could we but forge again the stamp pf divinity. Genius alone is the tme Prome theus that can come and breathe the breath of life Into the wayside rock, and bid it rise from its age-long slumber, " a thing of beauty," and a "joy for ever." In considering these statues, the question natu^ rally arises, what enabled a country smaller than Portugal — at its greatest length but a poor 250 miles, in Its breadth 180^to achieve such won ders? Was there ever on the world's surface such an aggregate of Intellect as crowded itself into the eighty miles that formed the territory of Athens ? A country rugged with rock, chilled with snow, with a craggy, uninviting seaboard, almost destitute of ports, and scantily furnished with objects of barter or commerce — a more un promising nook for great men to nestle in could GREEK ART. 243 scarcely be found. The broad plains of Meso potamia fumish room for the evolutions of the cavalry of aU Europe. Constantinople sees Europe and Asia like vassals at her throne. Venice is great, like England, from the moat that defends it. Eound Alexandria the navies of the world may float, but who could expect the tree of life to have taken root round the pines of Cithaeron, or the plains of Hsemus? Was it since so little could be done for the body that the soul drew aU nutriment for itself ? Did the protection of the rocky fastnesses, and the fierce hunger for Uberty produced by the never-ceasing wars that eventually destroyed Greece, give time to these favoured children of the Supreme to mature their strength for the world's conflict? They were attacked by the Persians and the Medes; and from defending they grew to brave the terrors of Susa and Ecbatana, to leam that silver spears and silken robes did not constitute power or courage ; and Asia became their trembling prey. Their blade of fine temper came In contact with the short sword of the Eoman, and it shivered like a blade of ice; they pierced the heart of the- r2 244 GREEK ART. Persian Colossus, and were about to sack his palace, when the horn of the Eomans sounded over the Euphrates, and a mightier than they took possession. Providence threw them away like a broken weapon; yet from this land came the perfection of almost every branch of human thought— poetry, philosophy, and mathematics. Homer and Euclid, the poles of the mind, are not to be superseded; men do not yet treat Plato's " Eeveries of Egypt " as old wives' tales, or the pathos of Euripides as unintelligible words. We labour for years to acquire a diffi cult and unspoken language, merely that we may leam the wisdom of these men. It is the first thing we teach our chUdren — the last thing we ourselves forget ; it survives in our memory the names of friends and kinsmen. Our poets still con their horn-books in the great school where blind Homer teaches. Why have the works of these men alone the gift of eter nity? We know that from Greece alone their un- creative conquerors drew their poetry, their science, and their philosophy. The Greeks sub dued the minds of their Italian conquerors, and GREEK ART. 245 SO enriched their spoilers, that they In their turn, became the historians, the poets, the orators of Europe. Strange, too, that the old Greek spirit should revive again the middle age — should prove stronger than priestcraft or chivalry — should subdue aU Uterature to itself — and should originate the Eeformatlon. A Grecian sage furnished from his vvritings the scholastic theology of the middle ages; the statues of Greece inspired Eaphael, and fired Michael Apgelo; the study of Grecian authors revived the Uterature of the fifteenth century, the modern drama is half borrowed from the Greek stage. Grecian sculpture formed the re naissance sculptors, as it directs those of our own day ; Grecian mythology opened a fresh world to the modern poet, and without it our brightest pages would grow blank. The myths of an impure but beautiful faith are more po tent than the records of a perfect creed. Our best Madonnas are but pale reflections of the Attic Venus. We go up half-way to the moon, we visit the bed of the sea, we make Invisible essences do our " meanest chares," we laugh at time for we go faster, we annlhUate 246 GREEK ART. space, we travel swifter than the planets, and with bottled Ughtning we amuse our chUdren; yet have we not learned to rear a Phidias or a Lysippus. We have had nineteen centuries of schooling, and we are stiU drudging at the bottom of the form. How came the Greeks, then, to excel? They had no cities of columnar chimneys looking up into the clouds; no trains from Thebes to Corinth, with branch lines to Athens and Sparta ; no electric wires from Delphi to Dardona ; no suspension bridge over the DardaneUes. We can give no reason for their triumphs, and con tent ourselves with the mere confession of ig norance, by attributing it to the chance com bination of fortunate circumstances — a way of judging of Providence something like that of a lady who explained all mechanical contriv ances as being "done somehow with a screw." Greek art seems to have originated in re ligious aspiration. The first sculptor strove not to enrich the palace of Miltiades, or the rich chambers of the voluptuary Alciblades, but to adorn his country's temple, and to express aU the ardour of his unhesitating faith. Great GREEK ART. 247 nations are always most religious at the climax of their greatness. Leonidas saw the faces of the gods smiUng upon him as the Persians darkened up the pass, and he cried to his men, " Eejoice, for to-night we sup in Hades ! " Cicero, speaking of his own countrymen, says, "The Spaniards excelled them In numbers, the Gaul in bodily strength, the Carthaginians in subtlety, and the Greeks in genius ; but there was one thing in which the Eomans went beyond aU the nations of the earth, and that was, in piety, religion, and a deep and spi ritual persuasion that aU human concerns are regulated by the disposal and providence of the Immortal gods." A deep and earnest be lief of God's direction and favour led the Greeks to victory at Marathon, as it led Mohammed to the destruction of the Pagan Koreish. A trust in God nerved the English arm that re pelled the Spaniard, as it did the Greek when he rushed against the gilded gdleys of Persia. The highest act needs inspiration from the highest faculty man possesses — and that is, the religious faculty. From its outset Greek art seems to have 248 GREEK ART. been based on religion. There was a demand for religious sculpture, and the demand was supplied. At the time that the religious mul titude craved for visible forms of a sensuous faith, there were found men whose minds craved such an exercise. It Is difficult in such cases to know whether the supply creates the de mand, the demand the supply, or whether de mand and supply be merely contemporaneous. It was reserved for a later age, and for the enslaved workmen, to create mere images to gratify luxury, or to pander to the baser feel ings. Art, which at every stage of growth, and in every country, proceeds from a vene ration and desire to reproduce God's work, and is, therefore, in a degree religious, was in itself at first actually a religion. The (jrreek who imagined strongest the actions of the gods, wrote down his imaginations, and be came a Homer or a Pindar. He who saw best their visible form, grew into the Phidias and Praxiteles. Neither Homer nor Phidias invented the fables of Jove and Minerva; but they must have impressed deeply on the minds of their nation the reality of the deities they GREEK ART. 249 presented to their eyes and minds. They gave vitality and shape to a faith before their time somewhat vague and visionary. Greek Art, starting from so high a ground, could not but deteriorate in purity as it ad vanced, though it might progress in execution and facility. The early sculpture of ^glna and the Parthenon had, thought, and the later Art finish. It answered to the usual stages of rise and faU — to the paintings of Giotto com pared vrith Correggio, or the rude carvings of the early English with the elaborations of the decorated; the monks' lUy and the lace work and flowers of Gibbons, fresco cyphers and the labour of Gerard Dow. The great German critic, Winckelmann, at tributes the Greek superiority in Art to the Influence of climate, to the freedom of their constitution, and to the national honour paid to Art. In the first place, their genial, equal climate was favourable to physical and mental develop ment. The Greek was strong and cheerful; and, from the beauty of his race, endowed vrith a love of beauty in either sex. By us mascu- 250 GREEK ART. line beauty is sUghted, and considered only- worthy the attention of a woman. Young men remarkable for their beauty were looked upon with respect, and distinguished by prominent places in the great religious processions. Crlto- bulus. In Xenophon's Symposium, cries out—' " I swear by all the gods, I would not choose the power of the great king in preference to beauty." Opplan says that the Spartan women placed in their sleeping rooms statues of the youthful gods, that they might influence their mind, and that they might bear beautiful chUdren. Dion Chrysostom asserts that in the time of Trajan manly beauties had ceased to be an object of regard; and we know that at that time Greek Art was dying daUy. The duUest mind in stinctively feels the beauty of the opposite sex; to appreciate that of one's own requires a higher cultivation of artistic feeling. Grecian freedom gave birth to the noblest aspirations, nor checked them In the develop ment. It took a whole nation to build a pyramid or drag a logan, but one man carved the Apollo; and the same hand that thought out the subject hewed the stone. (SREEK ART. 251 The third cause was the respect paid to Art by the Grecian people, and the deriiand for their labours. With the Greeks statues were necessaries of life. A temple was a mere dark Inclosure of four walls without the con secrating deity; a statue was a reward for every virtue, for physical as well as mental excellence. Pindar had a statue, so had Enteli- das, the athlete of Elis. The very horses that carried off the prizes in the chariot race served as models for native groups. The demand was constant, public opinion and religion sanc tified private vanity and the pride of the con queror. The victors at the games had statues erected to them in their native places, so that even their kinsmen shared their glory. The aspiration of the sea and mountain led them above all the calmer and tamer exceUence of the arts of a flat pastoral country. The Dutch man paints his cabbage and his broomstick — the Greek carves his ApoUo. The Greek artists were so honoured, that they were aUowed to place their own statues beside their 'works, to inscribe their names upon the figures even of the gods, and on works the property of 252 GREEK ART. kings. No slave to fashion, or private caprice, or the ignorance of a crowd, the works of the Greek artist were judged in public by the wisest arbitrators of Greece. Drawing and music were part of aU men's education. He had no transitory caprice to follow, or idle public to attract: he had but to do his best. The smallest invention in the meanest Art was regarded , vrith respect. Down to the times of the emperors, the names of the great jeweUers and silversmiths of early Greece were stiU re membered. Greek Art intended for the decoration of temples and public buildings preserved a gran deur impossible, among those who labour for drawing-rooms and boudoirs, whose works are sold and removed, have no abiding place, are liable to aU the casualties of private life, and are seen but by a few. The Greek artist, when he erected his statue, knew that it would becorae the wonder and admiration of half the civilized world, would remain where it was erected for ages, and must become the type of all future poets, painters, and sculptors. We have thus seen that Greek Art was an GREEK ART. 253 emanation of religious feeUng, and was neither devoted to perpetuate petrifactions of self, to render vanity eternal, or ugliness immortal. The Greek, a simple citizen at home, poor as Aristides or Phocion, or even when he was rich as Pericles or Alciblades, kept the best part of his wealth to lavish on his temple and his market-place. The real secret, however, of the Greek suc cess in Art seems to Ue in their early, un divided, and untiring worship of the beautiful; for this they disregarded every other property of Art — variety, novelty, vigour, even truth itself. Thousands of Venuses showed the pe rennial longing to realize the unrealizable. Their earlleat sculpture was the image of a god in the shape of man — not because it was not man they represented, but man heightened by divinity. They strove by combination of beauties, seldom uniting in the same model, to work out the unattainable excellence of their dream. They believed that the highest beauty was in God^the highest, both moral, intellectual, and physical. " They thought," says a German writer, , " that the nearest ap proach to the divinity, unattainable as it might. 254 GREEK ART. be, was in the perfect human form, taken at its ideal or highest moment." Every nation has its ideal moment — when an enemy is repulsed or destroyed, when it rises like Samson and bursts its chain, when it gropes out into light like Lazarus. Every man has his ideal moment — his moments of highest love, religion, or self-devotion; when he swears his love, when he weeps in penitence, when he perishes to save his chUdren. The Greek strove, by an aggregate of beauties, to fashion a being as free from every flaw as Adam was, rising to life beneath God's hand. Zeuxis painted his "Juno" from fine beautiful women of Crotona ; adding to the beauty of each some thing which the artist alone could give, and which alone could render such patchwork avaU able. The elliptic, the very line the artist so much loved, is the essential Une of the Gothic window — a shape which, Mr. Euskin beautifuUy observes, is a favourite one with Nature, being found In almost all our fairest leaves — giving an aspect of perpetual youth to. some of their deities, and of age to others ; they shed on aU a semblance of eternity, GREEK ART, 255 representing youth without Its weakness, child-. hood without its feebleness, and age without" its infirmities. The mere imitation of indi vidual nature seemed to them beneath the dignity of an art that strove to create the unseen, and not re-create the seen. The beautiful became all in all to them, originating in their sensuous mythology, which reaUy acknowledged no spiritual world or un defined essence, but only God-men, with in creased powers and enlarged capacities* The three wishes of the wise Greeks were — " to be beautiful, healthy, and rich." The Greek education realized the equal cultivation of the physical, the moral, and the intellectual; they learnt to be strong, good, and wise ; they had few fox-hunters, who never think ,or pray ; students who bleach over books tUl they die young, with their aspirations, unaccomplished ; they felt none of that black hypochondria that. makes half of our great thinkers visionaries, or that drives us to day-dreams in place of action. The thinker and the doer were not theh .necessarUy separated or antagonistic. Study and thought was a relaxation from the 256 GREEK ART. foot-race and the wrestle, the discus and the bestus, from the poem or the oration. Their minds were healthy, out-of-door, daylight minds; their errors did not spring from diseased livers, late suppers, or feverish midnights, but from obli quities of the age and race. What they did well, they did better than any nations before or since. Their final destruction arose from the firm maintenance of a great principle in juriously restricted ; and had Athens loved liberty less, union might have given an impetus to Grecian Intellect, that would have insured fresh conquests over the world of thought. They believed rightly that a sound mind needed to be backed up by a sound body ; they did not deem it necessary that an ad vanced civilization should necessarUy bring up men more helpless than the savage, with ob servation dulled, health impaired, and instinct dormant. Many of their most famous philo sophers distinguished themselves by carrying off prizes at the sacred games. Socrates saved the life of Alciblades ; Thucydides was a general and a statesman; Plato and Pythagoras, Cle- anthus and Chrysippus, were aU renowned for GREEK ART. 257 their personal strength. They wrote like ath letes — and about our literature, in comparison, there is all the punyness of enervated bodies; a successful tragedian and a rictorious wrestler are more nearly on a par than we can well imagine. The whole city went out to wel come a victor at the Olympic games; statues were raised to his honour ; gymnasia were built for his use-; he was maintained at the public expense ; and his children were provided for. They did not pay this homage to the mere possessor of brute strength; the mercenary seUer of his own blood, or the very loath some, hired homicide of our modern prize-ring; but they paid it to him whose patience and courage were tried by arduous trainings and reiterated struggles ; whose courage fronted death hourly, and who, by art and education, had .doubled the primary powers that nature had given him. The poorest as weU as the richest Greek had his daUy bath, and would as soon have thought of for getting his food as the exercise more necessary for the sedentary citizen than the peasant. The result of this hereditary training was that in no country, VOL. II. S 258 .GREEK ART. and in no period of the world, has the human form attained to such perfection as in Greece. The physical training gave strength; the moral, grace ; and nature heightened both by the pre^ existing gift of beauty. Prizes were given throughout HeUes to the most beautiful youths; in Sparta, that scarcely produced an artist, and even among the rude mountaineers and shepherds of Arcadia. Men were known throughout the Grecian world for the beauty of a single feature ; kings were considered honoured by a name that particularized their beauty. Their poets, whUe they pay little regard tb external4 nature — for the love of which we have to thank Christianity — speak of the dewy forehead, the swimming eye, the eye-brow arched like the Graces, the eye-Ud curving like the vlne-tendrU, and hair crisp as the hyacinth. Among such a people then, so beautiful and so devoted to the beautiful, did the Grecian sculptor study the human form — the noblest work that proceeded from the hand of God. Even to-day, among the beggars and hiU robbers of Epirus or Macedon, are seen faces worthy of Helen of ^gos, whose beauty was so universal that every GREEK ART, 259 one believed himself allied to her, and for whose love Troy perished. Daily in baths and gym nasia, by the river side, or stripping and anointing before the combat, the finest forms of Greece moved around the sculptor, till their beauty became a part of his own mind. He began life with a capital of thought with which modem artists leave it ; his imagination took flight from so high a level that its lowest soarings tran scended our loftiest endeavours. In daily wrest lings, leapings, runnings, cUmbings, the richest mind must have found suggestions. , He had not to trust to shivering models of low birth, unre fined In expression, coarse and vulgar by nature and by habit, depraved by suffering, emaciated by poverty, with forms marred by vice and infamy; the greatest beauties of antiquity were the types from which Zeuxis painted and ApeUes drew ; the noble youth of Athens stripped for the Palestra, needed Uttle ideahzation to represent the youthful Apollo, or the more graceful Apol- Uno. It is stUl a question amongst artists whether the Gi;eeks studied anatomy. We think few minds unobscured by controversial prejudice or S2 260 GREEK ART. artistic theory could faU to discern their deep knowledge of the internal, as influencing the external ; mere guess-work could never be in variably correct, and accidental imperfection would be inevitably visible. We cannot doubt that they studied deeply, at least in the later ages, both comparative and general anatomy; and had the self-denial not to use their knowledge pedanti cally, but to keep it subservient to their thought^ We know that the vast learning of Michael Angelb did not prevent him from giving up in despair his attempt to repair the right arm and hand of the Laocoon ; years of dissection did not enable him, vrith aU his display of knowledge, to evince the science visible in one limb of the fighting gladiator ; nor has any reparation of the antique by any modern sbulptor been completely successful; and the modern work beside the ancient looks like a milliner's flower of printed musUn beside a rose of Damascus. We are told they dissected apes, and are reminded of the superstitious reverence paid to the dead by the Greeks ; but that is no real objection — ^the Greek artist could have attended the sick, and watched the amputation of Umbs, and could have dissected GREEK ART. 261 those Umbs. There could have been little religious scruple about the bodies of executed criminals, dead prisoners, or barbaric slaves; and certain secrecy and connivance would have removed even those difficulties. A scalpel, after aU, only does neatly what the sword does rudely; and the burying or burning of dissected bodies would have removed every scruple. The Egyptians did not dissect ; and what was the consequence ? They left off, after a thousand years' study, nearly where they began. Grecian sculpture is peculiarly precious, be cause it is all that time has left us of Gre cian Art. Time has withered aU the paintings of Apelles and Protogenes, as ruthlessly as it has the leaves of last summer ; atfd of Gre cian painting we have scarcely a trace preserved. However admirable their works, they were, it is supposed. Ignorant of light and shade, and of perspective and of landscape. With the ex ceptions of the arabesques at the baths of Titus, or MsBcenas's viUa at Tivoli, and the mere decorative ornamentation at Pompeii, we have nothing but traditions by which to form a judgment. The old woman whose portrait 262 GREEK ART. threw the artist into fatal convulsions of laughter - — the foaming dog, which the sponge, throvra at in despair, completed successfuUy — are alike lost. The story of birds pecking at grapes, that Zeuxis coloured, is repeated in the studios of Spain and Flanders, and indicates no very suc cessful imitation. That a cow lowed at its bronze image by Myron we can easily believe, since a horse neighed at the Elgin frieze when Haydon was present. We know that the " Jove " of Phidias was scarcely more celebrated than the great picture by Apelles of " Venus Eising from the Sea," painted from that Campaspe whom the generous king bestowed upon the happy artist. Of the Greek power of design every cameo and relief is a proof. The group of Niobe, and of the -Famese bull, would imply a high power of composition in sculpture, which it would not be difficult to transfer to painting. Not only, however, did religion sanctify Grecian Art, but religion rewarded it when it had sanctified it. And this is Indispensable for the maintenance of a national art; for it is an easy thing to light a fire, but it re quires care and fuel to keep it blazing. Ge GREEK ART. 263" nius, if it soar like the lark, tolling ever towards a sun it may not reach, has still its nest and home on earth. Art Is a question of supply and demand, as much as any other trade which men carry on for bread ; there must be a demand first, or there vrill be no supply. The middle-age intellect ran purely.. to theo logy; the musician wrote church-music, the bard hymns to' the Virgin, the architect built churches, the painters painted chapel frescoes, and Paternoster Eow in the. thirteenth century was a cloister. The age built cathedrals, and needed cathedrals; Instantly the solid stone budded into life, the stone tendrils twined and clung, and threw out flowers and clustered leaves over roof and pillar. When it needed pictures, Eaphael leapt forth, brush in hand, and Michael Angelo stood forward to do then what he could not do now for. want of a waU. The Greeks, fuU of municipal pride, and eager for favour, erected daUy statues votive and tri umphant; their sensuous and creative faith required incarnation in stone — they used up Alps of marble in statues, from that of Homer down to that of a simple tUe-maker, Islands 264 GHEEK ART. and states became known for the number or exceUence of their sculptors; cities were ho noured for a particular statue ; wars were made about statues — ^they became subjects of national controversy ; whole nations shared the triumphs and jealousies of their leading artists ; their rights were remembered even amid the shock of arms. When Thebes was bumt, Alexander spared the house of Pindar; when Demetrius besieged Ehodes, he left the quarter of Pro togenes untouched. Socrates himself was a sculptor. The Greek led armies, shook se nates, and conquered nations, and came home to dream of beauty in his - modelling-room. The artists were the true high - priests of Greece — -the Interpreters of the unseen by the seen. We may imagine the number of their works by the fact that in that great marine store - shop of stolen goods, imperial Eome, there were more statues than inhabitants ; and that in one campaign alone the last king of Macedonia is said to have destroyed 2,000 statues. Eemember all those still existing, and those that must have been reduced to shapelessness by the ignorance or fanaticism GREEK ART. 265 of the Eoman, Goth, Lombard, Hun, Frank, early Christian, iconoclast Guelph, Cofidottieri, and aU the cameos and reliefs that have pe rished in the same way. The very sensuousness and imperfection of Grecian mythology heightened Grecian imagi nation and enriched that art. It was itself the most beautiful dream of the world's youth. In no other faith is the all-powerful spirit of the beautiful more conaplcuoua. The Mo hammedan has his angels of the dead, and his rebel giants — the Scandinavian had his hell-snakes and his colossal spirits of evil ; but these legends of Pan and Mercury, Dryad and Nymph, are marred by no frost giants, no monstrous afrits, no ghouls that feed on the dead, nor vampires that burrow In the new grave and revivify corruption; no lemures, no gibbering dwarfs or luminous mine spirits ; even the Medusa they represent calm and sorrow ful, the Furies beautiful in form and image, and the Fates Uke winged angels ; they had loathsome Charon, but he appears in no fable; and the legends of the Hydra, Chimera, Har- 266 GREEK ART. pies, and Gorgons are single incidents, not much regarded by the sculptor. We are scarcely able to judge of Grecian, Art by the few fragments of antiquity that time has preserved ; we might as weU venture to describe the surface of the Pre-Adamite earth from a fragment of primaeval rock. With a few glorious exceptions, rather curiosities than perfect works, we might as well judge of the new launched vessel by a wave-worn plank drifted up upon the beach — as well write a sur vey of a shivered planet after merely examin ing an aerolite that has faUen from it to the earth. Beautiful as are the ApoUo and the Venus, the Laocoon is, perhaps, the only original spe cimen of ancient Art preserved which is dis tinctly mentioned in the old writers; but with copies of old originals and works of the late Emperors we are amply provided. When we remember that before the time of Praxiteles, the contemporary of Alexander the Great, and the leader of the decorative or last phase of Art, Venuses were seldom represented entirely GREEK ART. 267 naked, and Fairies were rarely introduced into sculpture, being mere ornaments for private houses, we may at once Infer from how late a period the greater part of our modern sculp ture must be dated. Yet still exist — long since severed from each other it may be, but still preserved — the same statues about whose marble magnificence the smoke of Corinth rose heavenward in rich incense clouds to the God of battles, and the golden trumpets of Nero rang like shrieks of the Furies through the groves of Athens. The same wonderful productions of human genius ¦ — ^broken steps of that old ladder that once joined earth and heaven, and down which the descending angels trod in their hourly minlsterings. The powers that reared the Titanic sublimity of the Pyramids, or con ceived the exhaustless fertility of a Gothic cathedral, must have been both united in the genius that fashioned the ApoUo. An old legend says that sinless man knew the lan guage of animals — a bygone race framed the Apollo and broke the mould for ever. A 268 GREEK ART. Greek statue is a poem written in stone. Our sculptors. In comparison, have not got beyond shaping snow men, and their heads do not reach to the knee of the ApoUo. The very road-dust of modern Athens formed once, perhaps, a part of the noblest works of Phidias. We have only the lumber of her Art. Her soul has flown, and only the mere mummy- Case remains behind. Where are the 1,500 works in bronze executed by Lysippus? Where the 500 statues that Nero plucked from the pedestals of Delphi? Of Phidias's great statues of gold and ivory, his " Minerva " and " Jupiter," a rain bow growing to its perfect glory; these un fading flower leaves, these fantasies of melo dious colouring, that waU you in, and are subdued so gently by the shadows of the roof of those dim chambers, smaU as jewel caskets, give a very faint conception — beau tiful as they are — of the Eoyal halls, fading gently into a sunset ruin — the sUvery , sym phonies of commingling fountains, crimsoned with falUng rose-leaves, or the silver stars of the jessamine; of frescoed roofs, of wild' gar dens, beautiful in decay; of rich chambers, where the pomegranate blossoms cover the waUs with a perpetually - renewing tapestry,, richer 282 MOORISH ART. than ever Moorish woman could weave; of marble floors sUvered with moonlight, or throne chambers regUded and yellowed by the pitying sun. Where are the halls of the two sisters, or of the ' ambassadors ? Where the latticed trea sure-rooms of the harem, and the balcony of the Sultana? Where are the chambers where the fountains, murmuring like Moslems at prayer, are ever striving with the silvery laugh of chUdren's vpices, as if that ceaseless toil was spent to wash out from the pavement the ac cusing blood of the Abencerrages ? It was those red spots that brought the Christians so dark around the walls of the city of the Moors, that kept their horns thrilling so long, and made their war-cry of " Castile ! Castile ! " sound so vengefuUy through these perfumed cloisters. Where is the tower of the Comares, of the watchman, of the Infantas, and of the vine-press, of the aqueduct, and of the seven stories? Where are the throne-rooms and the prisons (buUt so near together in the East), the mosque and the bath-rooms? Here Is the pierced roof, but where is the gilded cedar of Aleppo? Here is the marble fountain, but MOORISH ART. 283 where are the alcoves of a hundred pillars, slender and graceful as the palm-grove? The gilded walls are here shimmering with pris matic light like a diamond mine, and gay with the colours of the chameleon and the pea cock. The rich fancies of dead poets are here too, flourished in gay scrolls of the letters of Arabia and of Cufa; though the pall of their author, who sleeps at Baaaora, by the -One Peralan sea, has long since turned black and withered. But the Andaluaian climate is stiU wanted to lend the last glimmer of en chantment to these starry fantasies of Solo mon and his ministering genii. A whole summer of Aragon, or two of Estremadura, would not make the soft warmth of a May day in Andalusia. That is the climate that makes the majo strut in his velvets and tassels, and the maja bound like a fawn in the fandango. Eoot up the pyramid, and bring with it no desert and no Nile, and it changes to a mere cube of heavy stone. Transplant the Doge's palace, and through a London fog it looms a dismal factory. It is the endless repetition of 284 MOORISH ART. beauty in the Alhambra that changes its grace and gorgeousneSs into majesty and subUmlty; not the one water-pipe, but endless foun tains, choked up with roses, and overgrown with spiced blossoms and spiked aloes ; not a few braidings of lapis-lazuli and attenuated gold, but leagues of gUded lace-work and rainbow wreathlngs, forests of slender piUars, their bases hidden by flowers, musical with nightingales, that build there as they do in enchanted gardens; and countless roofs, ribbed and in tersected with stars and suns, and Euclid figures, half p^blems, half flowers — sueh devices as the houris might create and mould into leaves, as patterns of blossoms for a second Creation. Add to these wonders, and, a hundred times more than aU these, all the changes of a Spanish climate, the delicate veUs of almost invisible shadows cast over such regal spots, the resplendent glories of a Southern sun, and the silvery bloom of- Andalusian moonlight. It is there that King Boabdil, who wept when he took his last leave of his lost kingdom^ holds his shadowy levees of aU the spectres of Granada, where headless Abencerrages present MOORISH ART. 285 petitions, and jetty Moors of gigantic stature make their bowy and describe the loss of buried treasure, which they had pledged their ghastly word to watch ; or, through the arcades built by the crowned descendants of the Ommlades, vrinds the solemn ¦ procession of sable night mares, who' presently hurry off in a demon hunt across the broad Vega, or go and pic-nic on tempestuous nights among the eternal snow- peaks of Sierra Nevada, kept warm by a glance of distant Barbary. ^The modem reproduction is badly pro vided with these supernatural appliances, and the groans of the murdered Moors are not heard there as in Granada. Were there all that we ask for, we should still require the broad green Vega, lying like an emerald bowl in the gold chasing of the girdling mountains, and the Alps of Spain to rise like sUver pyra mids into the burning sky. Let us deduct, too, something for the very excellencies of the copy. It is 'new, too garish, and in too hoUday a trim — it looks like OtheUo in a suit from Bond Street. There are no jewels torn from the turban, no blood upon the silken 286 MOORISH ART. robes — aU is fresh as when from the mosque of the Alhambra first sounded in the daybreak, " Come to prayer, come to prayer ! 'Prayer is better than sleep, prayer is better than sleep 1 " AU the gentle harmonies even of min and decay are wanting, and the decoration has a crudeness that in itself dispels the visions its beauty helps to raise. Yes I in spite of earthquakes, mines, and blastings, spite of Spanish galley-slaves and French soldiers — of Spanish bigotry, French pillage, and Flemish barbarism — of thieves and gipsies, contrabandlstas, muleteers and brigands — ^paupers, charcoal-burners, and snow-gatherers, the Alhambra is stiU one of the most won derful, as it is one of the most recent, of European ruins. It is the most perfect as to repair, and the richest in design; it is the best known to us, even to its minutest detaU ; It has suffered less from man or the elements, and has fallen more gently and imperceptibly to decay. It was not molten in an hour like Nineveh, or buried in a day like Pompeii; it was not drowned in fire like Sodom, engulphed like the sea-shore of India by the ocean, or MOORISH ART. 287 swallowed whole in the jaws bf an earthquake ; it was not smitten down at a blow like Corinth, or sapped for centuries Uke Athens. Though it has been alternately a barrack, a prison, a tea-garden, and an alms-house — though its harem is a hen-house, and its prisons pens for sheep — the Alhambra stUl exists one of the most wonderful creations of Eastern splendour and Oriental magnificence. There it stands, a great tomb-stone of a dead Empire, like an obelisk of Egypt; lingering in Europe long after the Moslem waves have roUed back again Into Asia, it remains as a bright sheU that is left behind by the tide, or as a gold cup that a Turcoman has dropped upon the steppe ; like the empty tent of a dead Arab stUl standing, though the rest of his tribe have long since pulled up their spears, untethered their camels, and have sought new homes in the far desert. , What traveller in Spain can forget his first glanee from the roof of the Generallfe, or the window of the throne-room, down over the gardens and trees, and the roofs of the old town of the Moor, where the grand cap tain and the sovereign he so well served. 288 MOORISH ART. sleep their sleep far over the seventy green riilles of Vega, vrith its tvrin rivers weriding^ their common way to the Guadalquiver ; the whole plain glovring in the sunlight like a golden sea, on which the white roofs of the farm-houses and haciendas seem to float like gleaming saUs on a sunset tide ; while around rise the bare, scorched sierras, arid above them aU the changes- less moon and Phangeful' sky, veering from the sapphire of noon to the pale ruby of tvriUght and the opal of dawn. That Vega, spreading wide with its groves and vineyards, pomegranate and citron treeS, a many-coloured flood of brightriess fused to one gold by the alchemist sun — ^Ups a broad plain, whose fields are stiU enriched by the blood of Moor and Christiari, shed iPrig ago, when jereed brossed . spear and scimitar flashed sunUght before eyes barred dark in the vizor. Well might the Moorish poet cry oiit in his rapture that the scene was fairer' than the valley of Damascus, and that the Xenil waters were like molteri gold flovring between emerald banks — and that Cairo had but one river, and Granada a thou sand mUes. MOORISH ART. 289 In this Eden, on the sloping waUs of rock that bar it from the world without, grows every production of the temperate and the torrid zones — from the sugar-cane and the palm, to the apple-tree and the fir, the walnut, the -cork-tree, and the chestnut. In this fragment of lost Paradise you may mount from the region of the balsam of the East to peaks where even the rugged Uchen wiU not Uve. At its heart is a deep alluvial basin, watered by twin rivers; while its lofty snow-peaks have been glittering beacons to the sailor on the distant Mediterranean ever since Scipio landed in Iberia, or Hannibal left exulting Carthage for the shdlres of Italy. Granada is a country of legends and of the past, and a place of pilgrimage for the present. Every crag has its falcon nest of a tower; every hamlet by which the Xenil wanders has seen the crescent set in blood, when the chivalry of Spain trampled down the pass of Lope; or has beheld the cross gUtter in the light of the beacon when the white steed of St. James was revealed in the clouds, and the stern picture of the dead Cld, vrith three VOL. II. U 290 MOORISH ART. green turbaned heads strung grimly at his saddle-bow, rode slowly by the good saint's side. The key to all national architecture is the material with which it had to deal. The Egyptian moulds his palm-tree in stone, and ornaments his capitals vrith lotus and papyrus. In India and China the tent turns to a pa- g-oda, as the Moor's tent-pole petrified into a column. We have already observed that the mural decorations of the Alhambra are imita tions of the luxurious shawls and weavings of Cashmere with which their tents had been adorned when Mohammed was visiting Syria, and ere Kadijah was yet a widow ; while some are imitated from the gUt leather of Cordova. Arab Art sprang from the Koran as the Gothic did from the Bible. Everywhere, could you but read, you would see written, "Blessing! God alone is the Conqueror!" AU creation is thus written over, but in a language known only to a few. The saUor reads God's word in the cloud, the geologist in the stone he treads on; the botanist in the leaf and the weed; the poet everywhere. The favourite mottoes of MOORISH ART. 291 particular kings occur as frequently on the walls as the bees of Napoleon did at Fon- taineblea,u, or the white swan and honi soit qui mal y pense on Edward III.'s tapestry. In the Alhambra much of the old severity of the Mohammedan ordinances is relaxed, for the purposes of architectural decorations. Per haps they thought designs lawful when once on the wall, and executed by Christian captives or Christian renegadoes. The Koran forbids any sculptured or graven representations of Uring things, as tending to idolatry. The Moslem fears even to tread on a piece of printed paper in the street, lest it should perchance contain the name of Allah. The Arabs, when they entered Egypt under Amron, defaced the sphinx with their lances, as the hateful work of the Jews. Yet here we have on one celUng frescoes of kings and knights, hunting-trains and tournays; and we see the Fountain of Lions, and the sculptures of deer hunted dow;n by vvild beasts. The coarse, crumbling, brick-Uke towers of the Alhambra are but a rude casket for the precious jewels, within which these wonders lie Uke crystals u2 292 MOORISH ART. in the bottom sheU of a colourless and earth- stained flint. Spain was the Capua for which the Moor sold his birthright; here ended his con quests; here his proud waves were stayed; and here the tide, so long advancing, began to slowly ebb. Gradually from the mountain caves of Pelago crept down the Gothic kings, like an unnoticed mountain-stream, tiU flowing wider and vaster over the broad plains of Leon and Castile, they scared the Moslem into flight. State after state fell; and the deluge rolled on, tiU the united waters, ever swelUng, never resting, reached the capital of the Moor, the last stronghold of the true believer, and washed into the very portal of the Alhambra. Cordova, with its gorgeous mosque and rich palaces, had long before faUen. The 1,030 towers, and the 200,000 inhabitants of Granada, had become a fable, and the cross- bowmen of the Vega were ridden down by the maUed spearmen of the Cross. A woman's beauty lost the Moors Ghranada — " L'amour tu perdis Troie, " Dux foemiua facti." As it had the Britons Wales, and the Goths Spain. A woman gave Spain to the Moors, and MOORISH ART. 293 a woman gave it back to the Christians. The undutiful son of the bUnd old Sultan, the last Moorish king of Granada, died in a fray in Africa, and his subjects became pirates with Barbarossa, or beggars like the Moriscoes. Their descendants still sit in the sun in Morocco, and see in visions the pleasant gardens of their former homes, watching the swallows, which they know wiU visit Granada in the spring, and return in the autumn, to be exiles like them selves. They faU asleep and dream of the sUvery fall of the fountain, or the soft ripple of the Xenil through reed and rush. In sun-scorched Barbary they sigh for the cool breeze of the Nevada, tbat fanned their royal fathers as they sat beside the flowings of the swift Darro. They are said still to possess the old Arabic title-deeds of every mUl and vineyard in the Vega, just as the Eoman cardinals exult in the nominal titles of English bishoprics. The sons of Moorish kings chaffer for hours about a para — would pawn the coffins of their fathers — and seU the very bones of the Prophet, could they but find them. They have still imagination ; for though others lie more naturaUy, they do it with a better grace, and 294 MOORISH ART. their fiction boasts a richness of invention seldom found even in the East. They have an inheritance of grace, for they pick your pockets or cut your throat with the dignity of an Emir. They no longer preach the armed conversion of nations ; but if rendering every Christian penni less would facUItate the progress of Moham medanism, they would wiUingly proceed with such profitable conversion. Some spots on the world's surface seem favoured above all others. Here the Cld, that savage type of early chivalry, and the great-hearted Columbus, may both have stood ; here Ximenes and the grand captain may have conversed ; and here Cervantes and Mendoza have rambled. To the Alhambra hill first came the Phoenician and the Eoman, then the Ostro Groth and the Berber, and after them the Spaniard and the Frenchman, the sun-worshipper and the moon-worshipper, the idol-fearer and the destroyer of idols; and, last of all, to filch an ^ornament from the great home of thought, the English tourist. He, like an Arab who lives by robbing helpless mummies of the papyri they clutch so fast in their black and shriveUed hands, racks his brain to weave his MOORISH ART. 295 fugitive rhetoric into three pages of his travels. He, with a great beUef of the present, and a great contempt for the past, on which he sets his heel, sits down, and, scribbling his profession of a regret which he could not share, and, inspired by the associations of the spot, a cigar, and a flask of Xeres, scratches his name on the gUded wall — an eloquent expression of the imperishable greatness of his country. 296 CHAPTEE XIL GOTHIC ART. " And glorious work of fine intelligence, Give all thou canst ; high Heaven rejects the lore Of nicely calculated — ^less or more. So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense llese lofty pillars, spread that branching roof, Self-poised and scooped iato a thousand cells, Where light and shade repose, where music dwells. They dreamt not of a perishable home, Who thus could build .... • . . Hopes perhaps more heavenly bright than thine, A grace by thee unsought and unpossessed, A faith more fixed, and rapture more dirine, Gilded their passage to eternal rest." Wordswokth's " Sonnets." Gothic architecture has this pecuUar distin guishing characteristic from Greek-— that the GOTHIC ART. 297 one is horizontal in its tendency, the other vertical. The one is fuU of repose, of the level desert, of Eastern calm, and deUghts in deep shadows and broad surfaces of Ught ; the lather is restiess and aspiring — its character is drawn from the tree-top, growing into the light from the mountain peak, gilded by the sun, of the motley of Northern brightness and gloom, of struggle, strong endeavour, and un conquerable wiU. The Greek decoration de Ughts in the human form, the Gothic in ex ternal nature; the one in abstract beauty, the other In character and contrast ; the one is stern, serious, and calmly beautiful; the other grotesque, vigorous, and earnest. Of the various hypotheses of the derivation of the Gothic order, some attribute pointed style to the imitation of the Dmidical groves, of wattled huts or the timber buUdings of the Saxons, or of the Pyramid; while Dr. MUner considered the pointed arch was suggested by the intersection of the round Eomariesque arches, when used in arcade work. Mr. Euskin has, however, aU but proved that the gable-roof is a necessity of climate, and was intended and 298 GOTHIC ART originally invented to throw off snow and rain, just as the flat roof was td fend the sun. But this he surely much overthrows when he goes on to compare the energy of the erect or vertical work — the work of a man urging himself to work amid a snow-storm — with the lassitude of the horizontal work — the inactive toil of one laid at his length on a sunny bank among cidadas and fallen olives. In the Northern Art he sees the serrated Unes of the pine-forest, and the long levels of the poplar ; and contrasts the effects of a mind delighting in the frost-work wreathed upon the glittering point of a spruce, and the dark green depth of sunshine that the Italian could see on the broad table of a stone-pine canopying some Me diterranean islp. The high-roof builder longs to raise pinnacles that the clouds may wander round ; the Southern delights in the level roof, Uke a meadow in the sun, or like the glassy sea in a summer noon. The Northern gets petty in detail, and loses a love of broad surface — smooth as a hUl-side on the breast of a lake — and aU appreciation of calm beauty, grace, and quiet truthfulness. GOTHIC ART. 299 The Southern gets insipid, with his calm and rest, and recoils at the exaggerated stare and energy of the Goth : the one is strong and powerful, the other beautiful ; the one active, the other passive ; for the one has more of the male, the other of the female principle of Art. According to Mr. Euskin, the six great prin ciples of our English Gothic Art, are savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, and redundance. Gothic is objective, the Greek sub jective ; the Goth delights to imitate, the Greek to create ; the one Is a love of the real, the other of the ideal ; to the Greek the Goth would appear a savage hewing with a hatchet, when he should pare with a chisel ; to the Goth the Greek would appear wearisome and womanly ; the one battles with the wind and rejoices with the storm, and continued heat and perfume he deems fit only for idlers ; the other thinks cold a preparation for purgatory, and warmth synonymous vrith Ufe. Modern glass-painting is as much a new art as oU-painting was in the time of Van Eyck ; 300 GOTHIC ART. and the great number of new churches has caused a demand for it, which the revival of mediaeval feeling has tended to increase. Every one famiUar with our " old petrified religions " —the cathedrals of England — remembers with delight those windows, mystic even in their numbers — " Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes As are the tiger-moth's deep damasked wings. Where, in the midst many thousand heraldries, A shielded scutcheon glows with blood of queens and kings ; " Windows that seem the spangled blossoms of that great stony net-work, that, twisted round roof and pillar, shoots rich leafage round the capitals, and branches arching over vault and doorway. If ever there shone "a light that never was on sea or shore," it is that rainbow radiance that sheds " rose-bloom and liquid ame thyst" on tomb and gravestone, Uke a glory emanating from the wings of unseen angels. Glass painters should go for their designs not to books of rules and parallelepipeds, but where the monks went — to nature; arid to na ture with the same faith and ardour that the GOTHIC ART. 301 monks went, guided by better taste and greater skiU. The monks took the oak-bough and the vine-branch, turned them to stone, and wound them round their columns. They plucked the honeysuckle, the wUd rose, the violet, and the trefoU, and carved their semblances to decorate their string-courses and their paterae. They gathered flowers from the English hedges as the Greek took the acanthus from his moun tain foot, or as the Egyptian took his water- plants or his palm-twigs. Our botany shows what attentive lovers these hooded men were of nature, and how they sanctified each blossom with a pious -name, blending so many with associations of the Virgin, making the snow drop and the lUy her emblems, and pronouncing a blessing to the Virgin's Bower, our Lady's Mantle, Cross-Flower, Herb St. Christopher, and many others. The use of legends as decorations, thoughtful and more suggestive than mere angular crys- talUzatlons, is also too much overlooked in the present day. The moat beautiful ornamenta of the Alhambra are those gilded sentences from the Koran that fill every intersection. The 302 GOTHIC ART. Egyptian walls were but ever expanded leaves of a religious book, in which every letter has a written beauty of colour, appealing to the eye that speaks every language as to the mind that may know but one. The monks, too, encircled their table-tombs with Lombardic — "Jesu merci, prie pour I'alme;" flourished their shields with protests of knightly honour and daring; or introduced scroUs, winding Uke immense horns from the mouths of saints and kings. Old English stiU gives us the oppor tunity of devotional sentences and curt proverbs, suitable to particular places. There stiU exist a thousand flowers, capable of myriads of com binations, which have never yet been employed by the artist. The beautiful curves and eUipses of the leaves of trees alone are sufficient to enrich a new order of architecture. The world was dead to the monkish thinker, as it is to us. He had Eoman traditions weighing down his imagination, and Byzantine uglinesses gog gling from every altar; but he trampled over these, and strode out to the forest and the field. Here aU was new, and yet eternal — per petuaUy changing, and yet grounded in sta- GOTHIC ART. 303 biUty. Grimly and faithfuUy he went to work, and at once the most poetical and suggestive of all styles of architecture rose to light : ' one not grounded on the finality and repose of abstract beauty, like the Greek; but full of aspiration to that heaven towards which pointed its spires, its towers, and its pinnacles. Medlseval architecture expressed a certain tone of feeling which does not now exist, and is nbt likely to exist. We need no long aisles for discontinued processions, no trifariums as bal conies for ill-guarded nuns. We no longer be lieve that to build a church is to secure a certain reversion of salvation; Art is no longer grated up in the cloister; the poet now writes other things besides hymns to the Virgin, and painters now decorate boudoirs, and leave altars bare and colourless. AU music Is not church music ; and we need some superstition, as well perhaps as much faith and much money, ere we buUd anbther cathedral. On certain pre scribed days we hear a low buzzing in some corner of our mouldy piles, like the sound of a few surviving bees in a rifled hive, but they are no longer resonant vrith fuU-voiced sympho- 304 .GOTHIC ART. nies and perpetual harmonies. The riches spent in keeping up these monuments of ecclesias tical dominion and priestly pride are better spent in village churches and country chapels. What has this age in common with the age of cowls and pointed toes — of iron-locked barons and shaven monks? The Gothic buUders had a rich feeling for decoration and for colour. Their eyes, debarred from nature, turned from cold gray stone to the laminated jewels that .studded their storied win dows, to their gorgeous albs and priestly vest ments, to their starred roofs and frescoed walls, to the bright mottle of mosaics and the glitter ing emblazonry of their graven brass. Their archit^ecture arose spontaneously from the wants of the age, growing through all the gradations of youth to manhood, answering every want of the priest and of the people — of the founder and the worshipper. Its wonderful and myste rious beauty was equalled only by its ready concessions to the sternest utility. It had, too, this great requisite in pure Art : it did not boast finality — it did not rest in a beautiful ab straction, that kept the soul entranced and sen- GOTHIC ART. 305 sually satisfied; it roused the mind — It raised it inquiringly to heaven — it hinted solemn secrets — It was restless, impassioned, and unsatisfied. In a word, it was Christian, and though it rose from the earth, its spires pointed to a higher and a more enduring world. It was not trans parent and perforated like the Arabs' work In Spain — not mountainous and stupendous like that of the Egyptians who rivalled the rocks- of Nubia; it had no fountains and open roofs Uke those of the sunburnt Eoman, It was fitted to bide the buffet of the north wind and laugh at the flame of' the lightning. Its light and shade were full of the storm and tempest that raged without. The spirit of the bleak moorland, of the blasted crag, of the silent lake, of the lone sea-shore, were all embodied there; and round the main bulk of this vital Christian Art howled and grinned all the demons of the yet living Paganism — ^local spirits and the whole congregation of the damned, caricatures of personal enemies, and grateful remembrances of buried patrons and dead kings. Below, in the crypt, lay the relics of the martyr — the hermit, whose wicker cell was raised three VOL. II. X 306 GOTHIC ART. centuries before a stone was laid, and beside him lay a Saxon king. In the founder's vault ' reposes a Norman chief ; round the niches of the aisle" sleep his crusading children. Under .the echoing stones of the cloisters slumber too the brothers who once paced over the spots where now they rest. National, local, and in dividual feeling consecrated' these great shrines of a common religion ; they took centuries to buUd, for centuries they were enriched, and it wUr take centuries stiU ere they decay. The medlseval feeling can never revive, tUl the world moves backwards. No great order of architecture has ever risen from the grave-^ Men build no more pyramids, hollow out no more rock-temples, rear no longer golden houses or Babylonian waUs and towers; the spirit, the faith, and the money are for ever want ing. No true genius can imitate, he must think himself superior to the men he in vain attempts to rival, and must despise the style he professes to adore. If he attempts to be partly original, he might as weU be so alto gether, and throw up the old for the entirely new. If he strives to invent, he must tran- GOTHIC ART. 307 scend the inventions of half-a-dozen centuries —must avoid the , rudeness of early Art, sur pass the richriess of the cUmax, and avoid the follies and corruptions that attend Its decline. He need have good heart and good brain. The architecture of other nations grew with their greatness and shared in their destruction, carefully shadowing every fresh addition to their degradation and their downfall ; but ours, on, the contrary, fell to ruins on the very daybreak of our prosperity, leaving us to barter our mer chandize for the taste of other nations, and to patch up our buildings from the pagodas of China, the palaces of modem Italy, and the de formities of Egypt — to borrow everywhere ma terials without the sklU to use them; to mass together flesh and bones, as Prometheus did, and yet find no heavenly fire to kindle them ; to go begging from all climates, nations, and lan guages, and yet return poorer than we went out. May this reproach be soon removed ! May we grope about dark Gothic crypts tiU we find the amulet that gave our fathers wisdom I Let no ignorant admiration of foreign Art x2 308 GOTHIC ART. lead us to ignore the necessities of climate and national character. We are an indoors people; we want sunlight without rain — sum mer air, and yet no winter wind. We may have sheltering porches and guarded cloisters, but no Moorish cupolas or transparent alcoves. We want warmth, and we want Ught; and let our architects remember that one use of a house is to live in it; let them show ear nestness of purpose and unintermitting zealj and the nineteenth century may still see a new order of architecture arise, in which the power of the Eoman builder may be blended with the softer beauty of the Greek. An order of architecture to be great must be national. The Gothic architecture was pre eminently English. The Egyptian took the Nile plants to ornament his pillars ; the Greek plucked the acanthus leaf; the Hindoo gathered the palm; but they used those natural types vrith a stinting and a niggard hand. It remained for the northern dweUer to regard nature with his childish and earnest love, to carve the hazel- bough and the fern-leaf, the rose-bud, the lily- flower, and the sacred trefoil, the oak-branch GOTHIC ART. 309 and its acorns, the havy^thorn, the clasping ivy and the clinging vine, the poppy, the honey suckle, and the clover. He needed the tutor ing of our rain-glooms and our sunbursts. He needed the teaching of poets who loved nature better than the Greek; for every aUusion to nature in a Greek poet might be put in the compass of "As you like it." He, first of all men, loved her with a pure, a perfect, and an untiring love; learnt, from the long watching for the bud, to regard the leaf vrith a deeper pleasure, to feel joy synonymous with spring, sober gladness with summer, sadriess with au tumn, and grief with the frosts of vrinter. The majestic monotony of an Eastern sun, the weary splendour of Italian azure, and the sublime melancholy of eternal snows, could not inspire such love. This love could be learnt only under a changeful sky of storm and shpwers, of slow growth, of gradual springs and long winters. We learnt to love nature as no other nation has ever loved her; no poets have sung of her like ours, no painters have painted her sweetest scenes better or more frequently. Our first builders strove to cover their roofs and 310 GOTHIC ART. walls with the stormy verdure of a perpetual spring; the monks dated their festivals by the reappearance of flowers, and named them after their saints and martyrs. The monkish builder united under one roof of his palace, his home, his, shrine,' his guest house, his conclave, his library, and his grave. The cathedral was the great temple of a whole province. Its painted windows were the poor man's IUuminated books, its tombs his sculptured chronicles; its choral hymns were aU that he knew of music, all that he could imagine of the voices of angels ; Its Incense was that peasant's perfume, wafted to him like the breath of saints ; its gro tesques were almost all that he knew of mirth. Once a week, at leaat, he might Uve as kings Uved, and share the pleasures of princes, and to his eyes its rich glass was flushed vrith the perpetual sunset of a vision. The sunbeams creeping over Its waU were to him the golden shadows of descending spirits ; and when the moon came, and silvered niche and pUlar, it must have seemed to that rude, but not insensible churl like the glories of a good man's dream. The cathedral was the vassal's concert-hall, his pic- GOTHIC ART, 31 1 ture gallery, his library, and his sculpture-room. It taught him through Art to love nature — and, through nature, to love God. It gratified every sense, and won each sense to religion, purifying and heightening every power. The monk knew that the boor was soonest taught through the eye, so to the eye he first directed his appeal. Though the European mind has not that gorgeouaness of taste in whieh the Asiatic ex ults, yet the monk was a great lover of colour, Look at his mosaics, his altar-pieces, and frescoes, his missals, and the rich blazonry of his he raldry ; see his diapered waUs and vrindows of perpetual fiame; his jeweUed robes, and the glittering embossments of his inlaid cups and chalices. English nature could not teach him this; the grey marblings of our sky, its scanty fire-streaklngs, and duU lustres of opal and pearl, the purple cloud of the heather, and the reddenings of our buds, the tinted granite or the llchened rock, the riches of the wild thyme and the gold of the furze-blossom, the hazy mountain nor the leaden lake. The violet and the snow-drop are poor substitutes for the 312 GOTHIC ART. flowering trees of India. The faint streaks of gold and azure on our wUd bird's wings, match feebly vrith the dyes of the tropic dweUers. But perhaps the indoor life that makes the busi ness men of this country love landscape-painting, and enables our painters to excel in colour, made the monk love the scenes Ke could so seldom risit, and rejoice in these festive hues of the sky and earth, when he was debarred from their reality. Jewels lent a lustre to his brown and sable robes, gUdIng took the place pf sunshine, and silvering of moonlight. From the same spirit of vexation came the fondness of the monks for aU attempts to depict human and divine love. The Saviour and the Virgin, the Mother and the Son — this is the soul of Gothic feeUng. These chUdless, isolated, un loved men, perpetuaUy depicted the tenderness of the ideal mother. Scarred wretches, who had fled bleeding from the struggle of life, deUghted to portray the agoriies of a boundless love. It is common to find such deep, stem, melancholy natures peculiarly disposed to love and to be loved. AU the debauchery of his Ufe could not drive away Byron's childish dream. Swift, the GOTHIC ART. 313 bitterest hater that ever hated, married Stella and won Vanessa's heart. Cromwell was a tender father and a fervid friend. Impossible and un natural as was the monkish Ideal, it was still, we see, based on these two deep humanities. The heart prompted every stroke of their chisel, and to accuse It of being barbarous is to mock the child . because he Usps and stammers. They knew that at the root of every flower was the great, universal, underlying earth. Their minds resembled their own high sculptured towers, that, while they are scathed by the lightning and marred by the whirlwind, still give shelter to the nestling birds. Their art, whUe it wears aU the sublimity of northern storms, exults in aU the beauty of the flowers of a northern spring. It is not for us to point out their faults. Who are we, to judge of their vices or their sins ? It is sufficient proof that the Monastic system existed. It was not the finger of a poor monk that could stop the roUing world. These con vents were the fortresses of piety ; their system was the reaction of sword law, violence and rapine. St. Bernard and King Jphn — Eochester and Penn— St. Paul and Tiberius — Wesley and 314 GOTHIC ART. WlUjes : such are the typified reactions of every age. The very pastimes of these men were usef\il to ourselves. From the madness of alchemy sprang modern chymistry — from the dreams of astro logy, the certainties of astronomy. Faraday and Chaucer's "Cheat vrith the Alembic," — Galeotti and Newton have still something in common. To their scholastic theology we owe the preserva tion of Aristotle, and the labours of their copiers saved Plomer and Plato from the fate of Ennius and Sappho. The monks looked at the storms of life through their painted windows, and mistook the lightning fpr the rainbow. Their ideal was too perfect for our nature. They were the first missionaries, and the first colonizers; the de fenders of the serf, the educators of the poor. The monk and the knight were necessary phases of a civilization dangerous and ridiculous only when their use was past. Every nation has given its art some peculiar attribute of divinity: that of the Mexican was terror; that of the Greek, beauty ; of the Egyptian, repose; of the Assyrian, power ; of the monk, love. Their faults were of their age. We should no more complain of St. Bernard preaching the crusade than we should of GOTHIC ART. 315 Elizabeth filling her prisons with the Jesuits, of Cromwell burning the priest, or Calvin drown ing the Anabaptist. What a grand triumphant progress of con quest over the unknown did these men make, from the low arches and massive columns of the Norman to the slender pillars and the lancet arches of the early English — from the thistle-leaf to the lUy and the vine — from the low pyramid-crowned .tower to the spire that shoots up, sudden and gleaming as a flame — from the trefoil arch to the muUIoned window and the transomed oriel — ^from the rude loop hole of the Lombard to the stony tracery woven Intricate as forest boughs against the sky — from rude corbel to flourished flnlal and flowering cusp — from rude arcades to walls incmsted with diaper, and flowers dying Into geometric flgures, the caprices of luxury and novelty. Has Greece anything finer to show In her friezes and entablatures than the imagination that pierced these parapets, piled these spires, cast these buttresses, bridged these chasms — that carved their Ungering paganisms in these 316 GOTHIC ART. grinning gurgoyles — that vaulted over these gulfs of air with mere films af strong web- work radiations, and clamped them here and there vrith the firm grasp of leafy bosses ? Does the Greek fluted pillar or sculptured pedi ment excel the fretted niches, the solemn echo ing cloisters, vrith their dead monks below and the saints carved above ; the self-poised roof, the high ribbed vaults, warmed by the solemn sheen of storied vrindows and these recumbent effigies? Gothic architecture now is like the prince in the Arabian tale, half man, half marble — ^half alive, half dead. The wharf flows on lapping against the mouldering fret-work of Bolton, and the Black Mountains look down upon the ruins of Llanthony, whose Art once rivaUed their nature. St. Cuthbert's stiU rises abpve the Wear, York above the Ouse, and Wells defies the storms of the Mendips, that only dye its tvrin towers with softer tints ; but Tintem and Val Crucis, the pleasant river side and the lovely vaUey, are shorn of their splendour. Lincoln is throned upon its hill, but a woful autumn has saddened the glories of its summer. GOTHIC ART. 317 Before we conclude, let us give a word of praise to that sure concomitant of great imagi nation — the strong common sense of the Gothic builder. He never swerved from the necessity of use; he learrit to beautify the use, but did not ignore it ; his necessities became beauties. He threw off snow and rain by high-gabled roofs ; he propped up vaultings with pUlars, and then let foliage grow round them in rich clusters. This beginning was rude, for men' do not use French cooking for herbs ; the first stool was not a throne, nor the first walking-stick a sceptre. The Instinct that made the Cistercians always buUd by the river-side, led the Benedictines to carve in stone the flower arid leaf, and to dedicate, as it were, to God all the beauties of this nether world. With their stone they did as much as the Greek with his marble. The Greek temple had a dark interior, but the monk's temple was his home, and thorough-lit by the daUy sunshine. The monk knew vvrhen to be mirth ful and when to be sad ; in his architecture there is every gradation of feeUng, from the broad grins of gurgoyle and corbel to the 318 .GOTHIC ABT. dark and solemn crypt. He had his saints who cured the tooth-ache, and his blood-stained martyrs. He had felt our noon warmth and the damp of our nights. His Art was a fuU reflex of the EngUsh mind and the EngUsh climate. THE END. E. BOKN, PKDITEK, GLOUCESTER STBEET, REGENT'S PARK. 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. MESSRS. HUEST A:tfD BLACKEH'S NEW PUBLICATIONS. TRAVELS DsT THE EEGIONS OF THE AMOOR, Aim the Russian Acquisitions on the Confines of India and China ; with Adventures among the Mountain KiRGHIS, AND THE MaNJOURS, MaNTARGS, ToUNGOUZ, ToUZEMTZ, GoLDi, AND Gelyaks. By T. W. Atkinson; F.G.S., F.R.G.s!, Author of " Oriental and Western Siberia." Dedicated, by per mission, to Her Majesty. Royal 8ro., with Map and 83 Illus trations. £2 2s., elegantly bound. " Our readers have not now to learn for the flrst time the quality of Mr. Atkinson as an explorer and a writer. The comments we made on, and the extracts we selected from, his ^Oriental and Western Siberia,* will have suflBced to show that in the former char-acter he takes rank with the most daring of the class, and that in the latter he is scarcely to be surpassed for the lucidity, picturesqueness, and power, with which he p'ourtrays the scenes through which he has travelled, and the perils or the pleasures which encountered him on the way.. The present volume is not inferior to its prede- ~ cesser. It takes us through localities, sotne of which are little, others not at all, known to even the hest read men in the literature of travel. The entire volume is admirable for its spirit, unexaggerated tone, and the mass of fresh materials by which this really new world is made accessible to us. The followers, too, of all the ' ologies ' will meet with something in these graphic pages of peculiar interest to them. It is a noble work." — Ath&icBum. DOMESTIC MEMOIES OF THE EOYAL FA MILY, AND OF THE COURT OF ENGLAND, CHIEFLY AT SHENE AND RICHMOND. By Folkestone Williams, F,RG.S., F.G.S., &c. 3 vols., with Portraits, 31s. 6d. "An interesting, pleasant, and instructive book, abundant in anecdote, and agree ably gossipping. It evinces considerable research, and(a generally sound historical judgment. " — Spectator. "This work belongs to the best class of popular antiquarian hooks, because it is popular hy reason of the entertaining character and the variety of its tnistworthy in-. formation. " — Examiner. NAEEATIVE OF A EESIDENOE AT THE COURT OF MEER ALI MOORAD ; with Wild Sports in the Valley of the Indus. By Capt. Langley, late Madras Cavalry, 2 vols., 8vo., with Illustrations, 308. *' A valuable work, containing much useful information." — lAtera/ry Gazette. "Captain Langley's interesting volumes will doubtless attract all the attention they deserve on account of their political and commercial importsmce; and as they are fiill of incident connected with the sports of British India, they will be as agreeable to the apoiiisman and general reader as to the politician."' — Messenger. HISTOEY OF THE EEIGN OF HENEY IV., KING OF FRANCE AND, NAVARRE. By Miss Freer, Author of The Lives of Marguerite D' Angouleme, Elizabeth de Valois, Henry III., &c. 2 vols., with Portraits, 21s. " We know no works of this kind, with the exception, perhaps, of Macaulay's History, which are more pleasant reading than the histories of Miss Freer. The charm of the style and manner and the accuracy of the details combine to render her works a valuable addition to our literary treasui'es." — John Bull TEAITS OF CHARACTEK ; BEING TWENTY- riTE YEARS' LITERARY AND PERSONAL RECOLLEC TIONS. By a Contemporary. 2 vols., 21s. Contents: — Lprd Melbourne — L. E. Landon — ^The Earl of Carnarvon — The Bulce of ¦Wellington — Edward Irving — Mrs. Shelley— Thomas Camphell— Robert Liston -Wil liam Lawrence — ^Thomafl Moore — Dr. Kitchener — ^Edmund Kean — Mr Justice Crowder ^The Bev. J. M. Bellew— The Rev. F. W. Robertson — Lord Macaulay — Lady Blessing- ton — ^The Rev. C. H. Spurgeon — Sheridan Knowles— Tyrone Power— Viscount Dillott — ^Thomas Pringle — A. J. Valpy — The Hon. Mrs. Norton. 13, GREAT MARLBORCftTGH STEEET. MESSRS. HraST AND BLACKEH'S NEW WORKS.— Contin'ued. MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF GEORGE IV. EroiD Original Family Documents. By the Duke of BtrOKiNG- HAM AND Chandos, K.G. 2 vols. 8vo., with Portraits, 30s. "The country is mueh indebtefi to the Duke of Buckingham for the publication of these volumes — to our thinking the most valuable of the contilbutions to recent his tory which he has yet compiled from his family papers." — John BuU. SONGS OF THE CAVALIERS AND KOUND- HEADS, JACOBITE BALLADS, &c. By Walter Thorneurt. 1 vol. with numerous- Illustrations by H. S. Marks. Elegantly bound. 6s "Mr. Thornbury has produced a volume of songs and "ballads worthy to rank with Macaulay's or Aytoun's Lays." — Chronicle. "Those who love picture, life, and costume in song will here find what they love," Atfienceufn, A BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS. By J. C. Jbap- PRBSOHf, Author of "Novels and Novelists," &c. 2 roU., with Plates, 21s. A SUMMER RAMBLE IN THE HIMALAYAS ; with Sporting Adventures in the Vale of Cashmere. Edited by "MatTNTAINEER." 15s. "This volume is altogether a pleasant one. It is written with zest, and edited with care. The incidents and adventures of the journey are most fascinating to a sports man and very interesting to a traveller." — Athencewm. A CRUISE IN THE PACIFIC. From the Log of a Naval Offieer. Edited by Capi. Atuueb. 2 vols., 21s. THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN ITALY: Impres- SIONS OP Life in the RbMAN States and Sardinia during a Ten Years' Residence. By Mrs. G. Gretton. 2 vols., 21s. " Mrs. G-retton's book is timely, life-like, and for every reason to be recommended." Athenomm,. THE LIFE AND TIMES of GEORGE VILLIERS, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. Erom original and authentic sources. By Mrs. Thomson. 3 vols.. Portrait, 31s. 6d. " These volumes will increase the well-earned reputation of their clever and popular author." — Examiner. TRAVELS IN EASTERN AFRICA, with the Narrative of a Eesidence in Mozambique. By Lyons M'Leod, Esq., F.R.G.S., late British Consul in Mozambique. 2 vols. With Map and Illustrations. 21s. SIX MONTHS IN REUNION; A Clergyman's Holiday, and How he Passed It. By the Rev. P. Beaton, M.A. 2 vols., 21s. LADY CHARLOTTE PEPYS' JOURNEY ON A PLANK FROM KIEV TO EAUX-BONNES. 2 vols., 21s. LORD WILLIAM LENNOX'S PICTURES OF SPORTING LIFE AND CHARACTER. 2 vols., 21s. THE VALLEY OF A HUNDRED FIRES. By the Author of "Margaret and her Bridesmaids," &c. 3 vols. TSOW JN COTJItSE OP PTTBLICATION, HURST AND BLACKETT'S STANDAED LIBRARY OP CHEAP EDITIONS OP POPULAR MODERN WOUKS. ILLUSTEATED BT MILLAIS, HOLMAN HUNT, LEECH, BIEKET FOSTER,. JOHN GILBEET, TENNIEL, &o. Each in a single volume, elegantly printed, bound, and illustrated, price .5s. VOL. I.— SAM SLICK'S KATXTRE AND HUMAN NATURE, Messrs Hurst and Blackett have very fitly inaugurated tbeii' Standard Library ol ropularModeni Works with this admirable voliune. With regard to this we can truly say r— Who can tire of the genuine sallies, the deep wisdom wrapped up in merry guise, and the side-splitting outbursts of genuine wit, in the pages of Haliburton? 'Nature aud Human Nature is particularly full of all these qualities ; and to those who love a good laugh, when they can enjoy it accompanied by good matter for reflection, and who have not yet read this production of Sam Slick, we can heai-tily recommend this elegant Edition." — Cntic, ^ "The first volume of Messrs Hurst and Blackett's Standard Library of Cheap Editions forms a very good beginning to what will doubtless be a very successful undertaking. Nature and Human Nature' is one of the best of Sam Slick's witty and humorous- productions, and well entitled to the large circulation which it cannot faU to obtain in its present convenient and cheap shape. The volume combines with the great recom mendations of a clear, bold type, and good paper, the lesser, but attractive merits, of bemg well illustrated and elegantly bound."— Post VOL. IL— JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN. "This is a very good and a very interesting work. It is designed to trace the career from boyhObd to age of a perfect man — a Christian gentleman, and it abounds in incident both well and highly wrought. Throughout it is conceived in a high spirit, and written- with great ability. This cheap and handsome new edition is worthy to pass freely from hand to hand as a gift book in many households." — Examiner. " The new and cheaper edition of this interesting work will doubtless meet with great success. John HaUfax, the hero of this most beautiful stoi'y, is no ordinary hero, and- this his history is no ordinary book. It is a full-length portrait of a true gentleman, one of nature's own nobility. It is also the history of a home, and a thoroughly English one. The work abounds in incident, and many of the scenes are full of graphic power and true pathos. It is a book that few will read without becoming wiser and better. — Scotsman. " * John Halifax' is more than worthy of the author's reputation. "We consider, in deed, that it is her best work. There are in it many passages of beautiful writing. Tho closing scenes are deeply pathetic, and few will lay down the book without tearful eyes. * John Halifai' is a picture, drawn with a masterly hand, of one of nature's- gentlemen. Everybody who ever reads a novel should read this one." — Critic, " The story is very interesting. The attachment between John Halifax and his wife is beautifully painted, as are the pictto-es of their domestic life, and the growing up of their children; and the-conclusiou of the book is beautiful and touching."— >4;^Afin«wj». VOL. IIL— THE CRESCENT AND THE CROSS. BY ELIOT WAEBURTOK. " Independent of its value as an original narrative, and its usefid and interesting information, this work is remarkable for the colouring power and play of fancy with which its descriptions are enlivened. Among its greatest aud most lasting charms is its. reverent and serious spirit." — Quarterly RevieiD. "A book ealeulated to prove more practically useful was never penned than 'The- Crescent and the Cross '—a work which surpasses all othere in its homage for the sub lime and its love for the beautiful in those famous regions mnsecrated to everlasting immortality in the annals of the prophets, and which uo other writer has ever depicted' with a pencil at once so reverent and so picturesque."— 5wn. [OOHTINUED OTS THE EOLLOWIlfa PAGES.] HURST AND BLACKETT'S STANDARD LIBRARY (contintibd). VOL. IV.— NATHALIE. BT JULIA KAVANAGH. " ' Nathailie ' is Miss Eavanagh's best imaginative effort. Its manner is gracious and attractive. Its matter is good. A sentiment, a tenderness, are commanded by her which are as individual as they are elegant. We shonld not soon come to an end were we to specify all the delicate touches and attractive pictures whioh place ' Nathailio ' liigh among books of its cXaaa."—.ktli£niBum. " A more judicious selection than Nathalie could not have been made for Messrs Hurst aud Blackett's Standard Library. The series as it advances realises our first impression, that it will be one of lasting celebrity." — Literary Gazette. VOL. v.— A WOMAN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT WOMEN. BY THE ATJTHOK OF " JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN." .' A book of sound counsel. It is one of the most sensible works of its kind, weU-writ- ten, true-hearted, and altogether practical. 'Whoever wishes to give advice to a young lady may thank the author for means of doing so."— Examiner. " These thoughts are good and humane. They are thoughts we would wish women to think : they are much more to the purpose tban the treatises npon the women and daugh ters of England, which were fashionable some years ago, and these thoughts mark the progress of opinion, and indicate a higher tone of character, and a juster estimate of woman's position."— . CENTER' (iritis a , Art ; BEQUEST OF FREDERICK WHILEY HILLES 'MhB I. ' :¦!