ceremony just "rubbed in," as if it had been but a stone lying in the foreground of the picture! Gainsborough, like Reynolds, was by turns ornamental or plainly in tellectual, just as fashion or talent commanded. Many sumptuous portraits the simple countryman painted. The Duchess of Beaufort makes a splendid picture; the drapery is decorative and forced up to utmost brilliancy. The Countess of Buckingham is of delicate flesh, perhaps rather waxy; the whole figure stands out in grace and beauty. Miss Linley and her brother are certainly charming, the eyes lovingly liquid; these children retain simple nature, as if they were of the woods and fields. It must have done Gainsborough good when he could get quit for a little of fashion and conventionality. Yet sometimes he was a martyr to folly indeed. He ran the danger of acquiring quite a barber's reputation for a head-dress, as witness the towering bank of well-brushed hair mounted on the forehead of the Countess of Dundonald.

Gainsborough divided his time between portrait and landscape; he gave, says Cunningham, like the poet distracted between two mistresses, formal visits to the one and a warm heart to the other. Hence happy became the work which could claim the painter's undivided affection. There are pic tures, such as that of Lady Dudley, wherein the rivalry between portraiture and landscape is reconciled. In such works the painter needs not the lore of academies, he feels not the want of foreign travel, but can trust simply to such knowledge as he may have gathered in the open school of nature. The por trait of Lord de Dunstanville is particularly fortunate in its just relation between figure and landscape; his lordship has the advantage of finding himself placed in the midst of nature; the figure, in fact, is made one with nature, each stands in accord with

the other. Perhaps it must be counted as unfortunate that his lordship should be made absolutely grassy, leafy, and sprayey, in order the better to assimilate with trees and foreground herbage; it is, however, on these conditions only that he holds communion with the soul of nature ! Again, the portrait of Lady Dudley combines with advantage figure and landscape, though the mannerism of Gainsborough has been pushed rather far. Here, again, the “tree touch" is carried into the drapery with a certain looseness of hand peculiar to the master. Yet thus, when figures share in the landscape, and nature in return throws simplicity and ease into the figure, the entire picture becomes blended and mellowed in singular harmony and beauty. Thus Gainsborough's

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appeared as the work of a man who had never learned from a master the regular practice of art, but of a painter of strong intuitive perception of what was required, and who hence found out a way of his own to accomplish his purpose." Gainsborough, indeed, had system in his apparent carelessness, an art in his artlessness; and thus, as Reynolds admits, "those odd scratches and marks which, on a close examination, are so observable in Gainsborough's pictures, this chaos, this uncouth and shapeless appearance, by a kind of magic, at a certain distance assume form, and all the parts seem to drop into their proper places." To a remarkable degree, indeed, Gainsborough learned in execution to reconcile substance with shadow and solidity with lightness.

Gainsborough, like Reynolds, reserved the best of his intellect for sitters of intellectual strength. William Pitt he treated as of cold calculating wisdom-a man whose features kept propriety and seldom were subject to passion. What a contrast is Reynolds's portrait of

Fox-passionate, ponderous, and of stormy eloquence! Gainsborough, strange to say, when he approached ungoverned Goldsmith, was unusually studious of form. And surely one of the most remarkable portraits ever painted is that noble head of Benjamin Franklin. This picture evidently cost the painter more than usual pains: he dares not play at random with his subject; it were desecration to turn such a noble head to decorative ends; and so Gainsborough represents Franklin simply the good great man of noble bearing. The artist kindly reserved his best powers for the portraiture of himself and his wife. Mrs Gainsborough, even to this day, is a delight to look on age cannot wither the flowers that bloom in this brilliant picture. What resplendence of colour! what facility of execution! what taste, skill, and knowledge in art-treatment! The eyes look out from the canvass with light in their distant depths: there is speech in the lip and breath in the nostril. Yet, as common with hasty, offhand Gainsborough, the drawing of that nostril is defiantly wrong. Yet is it hard to withhold worship from Gainsborough even in his faults. He was at once an artist and a child of nature, and when death came to him, his regret, says Reynolds, at losing life was principally the regret at leaving his art.

Raeburn, with reason, has been reckoned the Reynolds of the North. To his keeping was committed the genius of Edinburgh. Near upon the time when Raeburn, on his return from Rome, set up his easel in Scotland, poetry, philosophy, and science had made Edinburgh a northern Athens. Burns had published his poems; Blair his sermons and rhetoric; Adam Smith was deep in the Wealth of Nations;' Dugald Stewart made metaphysics quite the fashion; Sir Walter Scott had created an era in the literature

of imagination. Robertson, Hume,

Playfair, Hutton, Boswell, Mackenzie, and Ferguson still further swelled the bright company of celebrities congregated in the northern capital. It was the good fortune of Raeburn not only to be knighted as limner in ordinary to his sovereign, but to be, as it were, portrait-painter extraordinary to rank, beauty, and genius generally. And the artist, it must be confessed, was not unworthy of his good fortune; portrait-painting he deemed the most delightful of occupations, and his sitters, sharing the same opinion, brought with them smiles and best looks. Raeburn was just the man for lairds of mountain clans clad in picturesque tartans; these chiefs found themselves on canvass in the loftiness and command of small sovereigns; their figures stood out in a massive impressiveness, made all the more ominous by backgrounds portentous in storm, mingled with mountain - mist for poetry! At Kensington the other day were exhibited ten of Raeburn's portraits, which justified to a London public the fame enjoyed by the painter in his native land. Yet Raeburn seemed over-anxious to sustain his fame as a colourist. He planted in the cheek the rose rather than the lily, and thus his pictures contracted the vice of ultra-redness. The portrait of Adam Ferguson, however, leaves little to be desired artists deem it masterly, the general public pleasing. picture is capital for colour, arttreatment, and individual character. Raeburn lived till 1823, and therefore we shall hope to meet him again in the portrait-gallery, which in the coming year will enter upon the present century.

The

Lawrence, in like manner, is divided between two centuries: his style is essentially modern, he belongs to our own times. At all events, it is now impossible to accord to this tasteful and fashionable painter the space his merits deserve. Whatever his defects or mannerisms, certainly it were im-.

possible to deny brilliancy and art-address to the portraits of the Honourable William Windham, Baron Auckland, the Marquess of Bath, Earl Grey, Warren Hastings, James Watt, the Marquess of Exeter, his Countess, and Lady Sophia Cecil, and Eliza Farren, Countess of Derby. Lawrence, doubtless, in his shadows sought force in excess of blackness, and in his lights he trusted to abrupt transitions for brilliancy: his reds and pigments generally are chalky and crude. Ladies as painted by Lawrence are not quite in the best style: they are not quiet enough; on the contrary, they incline to be loud, obtrusive, and showy. Hence women as painted by Reynolds and Lawrence have little in common; intuitively they would avoid each other. Neither are gentlemen on the canvasses of Lawrence quite the right sort of thing; they have overmuch attitude for statesmanship, too much consciousness for the quiet of good-breeding. In short, the characters of Lawrence are drawn from the stage rather than from nature; they have more the affectation of fashion than the honest truth of a large humanity.

Other painters there were who, by an occasional portrait, filled up gaps in the biographical history of our country. There was Northcote, the son of an honest watchmaker, who, with ten guineas in his pocket, walked from Plymouth, sleeping in hedges and haylofts on the way, and presented himself at the studio of Reynolds in Leicester Fields, determined to be a painter. A pensioner on genius, Northcote fed on the crumbs which fell from his master's table: his portraits are coarse, his original compositions commonplace. Then there was Opie, "the Cornish Wonder," the son of a village carpenter; he, too, set out from the west, drawn eastward by the ascendant star of Reynolds. Opie, it is said, bore the aspect of an in

spired peasant, yet was there little inspiration in his works. Like other painters of the day he was ambitious of history, but lacked imagination, and so now his fame rests on the breadth, vigour, and character of his portraits. We owe to him the heads of Dr Priestley, Peter Pindar, his patron, Edmund Burke, Lord Kenyon, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mrs Delany. In the presence of these pictures it is easy to understand how the peasant's genius might excite the eye of wonder, yet fail to secure the countenance of fashion. The painter's style has little refinement, subtlety, or art; the touch of the brush is vigorous as the stroke of a stonemason's hammer! Yet a certain rude strength of character enabled Opie to take the gauge of originality and eccentricity in others. head of Mary Wollstonecraft, as a study of physiognomy, is a curios ity; the length of the woman's arm lying ready for mischief in her lap warns the spectator to keep at a safe distance! Another head, wherein by incisive lines a whole biography has been written, is that of good, gossip-loving Mrs Delany. Opie was a shrewd sententious man, and his touches, like his words, were home-thrusts much to the point. The painter and his sitter were well met: verily there was not a more delightful, chatty, or comfortable old woman last season at Kensington than Mrs Delany.

The

High art approaches portraiture not so much with condescension as with incapacity. It was said of Haydon that had he been able to portray a single head well he might have painted history worthily. From the time of Sir James Thornhill downwards it has been found that artists who cover acres of canvass make a sad mess of a single countenance. There was poor Barry, what could he do but give to his sitters a mock-heroic brow, with a rag of a blanket

thrown across the shoulders, the remnant of classic drapery and supposed symbol of high art? Then there was West, never too wise at best; he also, when intent on enacting high art, subjected poor humanity to a process of grand generalisation. Copley had certainly stronger stuff in him, as might be expected from the man who was father to Lord Lyndhurst. His chief picture, "The "The Death of Chatham" in the House of Lords, now the property of the nation, is individual and true. West in his sacred compositions was not particular as to facts; but Copley felt that with the peers of the realm he could not take the liberty that his contemporary had presumed upon when painting the whole company of the Apostles! Yet West on a certain signal occasion was no less than Copley to be applauded for honest resolve to chronicle public events just as they fell out, and portray men as they actually lived and looked. "The Death of Wolfe" is rightly reckoned as a turning-point in the practice of the English school of painting. The custom previously had been to clothe a British soldier as a Roman warrior; and Barry, to be still more classic, had cast off clothes altogether, and so painted Wolfe and his comrades on the battle-field absolutely naked! Now, when it was rumoured that West proposed to substitute coats for togas, Reynolds, accompanied by the Archbishop of York, thought it proper to call upon the painter to expostulate against the bold innovation. West was ready with his reply. He urged that the event to be commemorated happened in a region of the world unknown either to the Greeks or Romans, and at a period when classic costumes were no longer worn. Truth, he urged, which is law to the historian, should rule the painter also: it is needful to mark the place, the

time, and the people accurately. When the picture was finished Reynolds retracted; the innovation was justified by success, and the dreaded revolution in art peacefully accomplished. Henceforward the barriers were thrown down which had divided historic painting from portraiture. The writer and the painter of history were put upon equal footing: the one could not annul biography; the other was no longer permitted to do violence to portraiture. And so we arrive at length at our present practice: whenever an historic event is painted, search must first be made among the portraits of the period.

The art of portrait-painting since the days of Reynolds, we regret to say, has been in decline; the portraits of the present century compare unfavourably with those of the past. The prophecy of Reynolds has not been fulfilled. "I look," said he, "for such an improvement in British art, that all we can now achieve will appear like children's work in comparison with what will be done." Ninety years have sped since these words were spoken, and still the portraits of Reynolds and Gainsborough do not sink into "children's work." When the present century, with its statesmen, lawyers, men of science and of letters, shall have passed away, hard will it be to collect at Kensington a portrait-gallery_worthy of our contemporaries. Paper photographs will be poor substitutes for oil pictures. It is the duty of each age not only to make history, not only to write history, not only to paint history, but also to put on worthy record the faces of the men and women who have embodied the spirit of the age. This was done faithfully and well by the portrait-painters of the past century, and we thank them for having thus made the dead present with us.

CHARLES MATHEWS, who mimicked all mankind and was himself inimitable, used to give a most amusing sketch of a man returning thanks for his health being drunk at a public dinner. He was alternately modest and triumphant, peaceful and bellicose. He ventilated all the commonplaces, so dear to the English heart, about our rickety lath-and-plaster houses being castles, and our dominions on which the sun never sets-and on one of the most interesting spots to ourselves, he might have added, very seldom shone-and he ended by the words British Constitution, the very sound of which rouses John to a hoarse hoarse cheer, and enables the speaker to subside in a perfect torrent of applause. A great deal of time-honoured eloquence, civic and general, was rendered totally worthless and impracticable by this clever imitation. It was impossible for the most barefaced of aldermen to rise, unaccustomed to public speaking, or unable to find words to express this, that, or the other; neither could he declare that he had no merit in the matter to which they so flatteringly alluded beyond the humble one of good intention; he could not with humility refer to the rank from which he sprang in life, nor proudly proclaim the high station to which the kindness of friends and the favour of a gracious sovereign had raised him. The ground was cut from under his feet everywhere. The flag that braved the battle and the breeze was folded and laid by; the indomitable spirit which made the Anglo-Saxon the pioneer of civilisation throughout the globe was a little disposed to rest and thankfulness; and in fact the man out of sheer necessity was driven to be sensible, and in consequence to

be, what is scarcely less commendable, very brief.

It would be, however, too much to expect that in an architecture as composite as this every trace of incongruous ornament, or tasteless decoration, could be at once eradicated. A great deal certainly has been done: the flippant platitudes men once indulged in, and repeated with the applause of surrounding citizens, have in a great measure given way. People are not half so emotional as they used to be, and men do not pledge themselves in the same fervid manner to persist in doing something which they had not even begun to do at the time of the pledge.

A good deal of humbug has been weeded out of public eloquence, and high-faluten left almost entirely to the Buncumites beyond sea.

For the most part men say something when they rise now in public. It may not be very novel or verystartling. It may not be suggestive nor even interesting, but it will certainly reveal something of the speaker himself, of what sort of man he may be, and what kind of faculties he is blessed with-that is to say, he will not limit himself to retailing a conventional set of phrases, which meant very little when first invented, and less every time they were reproduced.

If I were to judge from the success with which the oldest Joe Miller is greeted in the House of Commons, the roars of laughter that follow the most stupid sallies of a cross-examining barrister, or the way in which a Haymarket or Strand audience rock to and fro in enjoyment of the stalest old jokes in the language, I'd be disposed to say the British public has lost one of its greatest pleasures by this change of public speaking.