He smiled, and said nothing. Of all the great colourists, he preferred, he said, those who pronounced their white in a positive manner; and he reckoned it a degeneracy in some of the Flemings, and Vandyke among them, that they reduced the pure white to a sort of gray. "The Venetians," he observed, "made white tell distinct from all other tints; a perfect white." This he himself acted upon in his very latest productions: in his earlier paintings he used white of a warm cream colour.

In describing the impressions which the works of Raphael and Michael Angelo made on him, he said, that, with all the perfections which the former possessed, there was a profoundness of thought and expression in the other that demanded deeper attention. "Had I been six times to see Raphael, I must have gone seven times to see Michael Angelo." Before he went abroad, he used to say, "Why should go to Italy to study; have we not Reynolds here?" He also averred that Sir Joshua excelled all other masters save Rembrandt, the most powerful imitator of the effect of nature that art had ever produced. He loved, and he excelled in painting, fine mouths and dark eyes; and he took particular pleasure in painting an ear, the intricate and elegant drawing of which he said required mastery to imitate. "He appeared in painting," said a friend who knew much of his ways, "with the alacrity of one engaged in what to him was truly delightful But he had two 'attentions.' If he enjoined a friend to read while he painted, that which he gave to the reader seemed his whole attention. I never knew him break in upon the reading for his own work, but often lay down the pencil to laugh or weep over the book. Yet there came, perhaps, a moment in which his intense gaze at, and study of his subject, possessed him wholly; the next he dashed up to the canvass, and the effect was gone. To do, what he once understood, seemed the mere play of his hand; and

only mechanically and rapidly making that out which his mind had previously settled. That manner of doing always exactly what he appeared to intend, rendered the progress of his picture a very interesting and instructive sight." He was capable of great exertion. On being asked for how many hours he had ever painted without ceasing, he said thirtyseven; and that was on the portrait of Lord Thurlow. He began at seven in the morning, painted all day and all night, and all next day till eleven in the following night; "by this time," said he, "I could not distinguish one colour from another; remember, too, I was standing or walking all the while, for I never paint sitting."

He could see at a great distance, and also quite close; the first aided him in catching the general expression, and the other in communicating those finer touches, those almost half invisible lines to his finished drawings and paintings, which go in the gross to make up the excellence of the likeness. "That fineness of feeling," said one of his most gifted friends, "which made him so sensible to the slights and caresses of the world, probably gave him in his art a delicacy of thought and of touch scarce ever surpassed: making him alike sensible to the utmost refinements of nature in his own labours, as well as powerfully alive to any deficiency in them, in the works of others. This, however, which made so much of the charm of his art, with which he could seize, and give an interest to the scarcely visible irregularities of beauty, and touch the feathers, or the silver tissue, with a lightness which seemed to suspend them in the air itself, was in him, as it always must be with genius, accompanied by a strength where strength was wanted, which gave to all that was fine and delicate its true value. When once asked what he was doing, he said, 'All uncertainty -taking refuge in difficulties.'"

As a portrait-painter, his merits are of a high order.

He has been called the second Reynolds; not from being an imitator of the style of that great master, but from possessing very largely the same singular power of expressing sentiment and feeling, and of giving beauty and often dignity to his productions. He resembled him less in breadth and vigour than in the freedom and elegance of his attitudes, in his skilful personation of human thought, and in the exquisite grace and loveliness with which he inspired all that he touched. One age of the great men, and the courtly beauties of England, will live to posterity on the canvass of Reynolds. Another will do so on that of Lawrence.

There is much elegance, nay, vigour, in many of the male heads of Lawrence; and over most of them, and all his ladies, he sheds a natural splendour of colouring, which, like sunshine in dew, is as refreshing as lustrous. The mouths of his men, and the eyes of his women, are made only for eloquence and love. Of all his three hundred and odd exhibited portraits, there is, perhaps, not one that can be called commonplace, either in character or in handling Of these, forty are in the royal gallery, and some fourteen in the collection of Sir Robert Peel. The taste of the times suited his talent; the courtesy of his manners, and the politeness of his pencil, alike aided in his ascent. To him the present was every thing, and the past nothing; he had no visions of loveliness past and gone: he saw but living life: his genius was for the court, the elegance of fashion, and the bloom of the hour. Almost every thing that he did showed his leaning to the soft, the graceful, and the effeminate.

His plan of working was, in my estimation, erroneous; he put in the heads of his portraits at once, but often left them floating in the midst of a blank canvass, until it was difficult for him to recall the exact effect he had originally meant to give to the whole figure. The painter ought surely to bring out

the whole man together. It has been said that he trusted inferior hands with filling up his backgrounds, and even the bodies, in many pictures; but I have ascertained that this was very far from being his custom, and that he himself finished all the pieces on which his fame depends, with most laborious and honest patience, to the minutest touch of a drapery.

Many think it is to be regretted that a continued influx of sitters filled up all the time of Lawrence, after he had acquired unrivalled skill in the mechanical portion of his art. He then, we are told, longed for leisure to give to the world a series of works of a higher order than mere portraiture, and yet partaking of its nature,-I mean, something half real, and half poetic; like what he has given us a fine specimen of in his Kemble as Hamlet. I am not prepared, however, to say, that I think his fame would have been lastingly served by an accumulation of pieces of this kind. At all events, twenty of them would hardly have atoned for the loss of one really great man's portrait from the hand of Lawrence.

Sir Thomas himself sometimes imagined that his genius fitted him for excelling in historical composition. He said that he withdrew reluctantly from it, lest it should end with him as it had done with many, in misery and disappointment. England looked, he averred, with coldness, and even aversion, on all such works; and he considered that the taste of the age was an effectual bar to all epic glory. Of his fitness for historic productions let his sketches speak. His studies, as those ruder designs are called, which usher in the finished performances, are all of a very different order. They were facsimiles of heads which he was commissioned to paint, or figures in academic postures, such as students draw; but there are no indications of a spirit aspiring to higher things: neither the court, the camp, the historian's page, nor the poet's song, had inspired him.

JACKSON.

DURING the earlier days of art in Britain, a painter was required to be cunning in other crafts: he was, as the records of Henry III. tell us, carpenter, mason, glazier, house-painter, gilder, emblazoner, embroiderer, upholsterer, and tailor. We have no artist now, perhaps, who unites all or any of those professions with his own: yet, collecting its members mainly from the humbler ranks of life, art has had among its followers men of fame and name who were bred to other pursuits: Inigo Jones, if we may credit the sarcastic Ben Jonson, was originally a carpenter; Sir Christopher Wren had been an astronomer and mathematician; Hogarth, a silverchaser; Banks, a worker in earthenware; Romney, a cabinet-maker; Bird, an ornamenter of tea-trays; and the painter, of whose life and works I am now about to write, was for some time a tailor.

John Jackson was born the 31st of May, 1778, at Lastingham, a little village in the North Riding of Yorkshire. His father, the tailor of the place, desirous of ensuring bread for his son, apprenticed him at an early age to his own business. I have heard that the boy had an internal dislike to the trade, and worked at it with no good will: he had, probably, no settled notion of what pursuit was most suitable; a country bred boy can see but little to select froni. His aversion to the needle and shears arose wholly from his love of painting, which came upon him while at school, and grew and gathered strength, as he related, from visits which he made to the pictures in the galleries of Lord Mulgrave and Castle-Howard.

VOL. V.-U