lamented that you did not pursue your classical studies farther, as you are now deprived of many noble subjects for painting you would otherwise have had. You may remember, that to Homer's description contained in two or three lines, Phidias acknowledged himself indebted for the so much celebrated statue of the Olympian Jove. It must, indeed, be confessed, that there is a large field for the exercise of your art in the descriptions of our three great English poets, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, not to mention the number of excellent subjects in the Scriptures."

Thus instructed he commenced his London life, and after having studied there for a year, he was advised by Sir Joshua Reynolds to pay a visit to Rome, for the purpose of viewing the specimens of the old masters there preserved, particularly the paintings of the Sistine Chapel. The journey to Rome could not be undertaken without considerable expense, and Burke, knowing the poverty of Barry's condition, offered to pay his travelling charges to that city, and promised to settle the sum of fifty pounds per annum upon him during his continuance there as a student. His route to Rome lay through France, and he passed onward by the smiling, pleasant land of sunny Burgundy, with clustering vines, and cattle-covered steeps; he copied some pictures in the Paris galleries, and sent to Burke a very clever painting of Alexander drinking the Potion, after the great picture of La Sueur.

His life in Rome, like his life at all other places, was one continued battle with his superiors and with his fellow pupils. Reynolds advised him to study those subjects which could not fail to elevate his style, and imbue his mind with noble conceptions of art and of its objects. These were suggestions worthy of the great President writing upon his own profession; and Burke, in cautioning Barry against the too ardent employment of his fancy and of his intellect, thus counsels him :—

"You whose letter would be the best direction in the world to any other painter, want none yourself from me, who know little of the matter. But as you were always indulgent enough to bear my humour under the name of advice, you will permit me now, my dear Barry, once more to wish you, in the beginning at least, to contract the circle of your studies. The extent and rapidity of your mind carries you to too great a diversity of things, and to the completion of a whole, before you are quite master of the parts, in a degree equal to the dignity of your ideas. This disposition arises from a generous impatience, which is a fault almost characteristic of great genius. But it is a fault, nevertheless, and one which, I am sure, you will correct-when you consider that there is a great deal of mechanic in

your profession, in which, however, the distinctive part of the art consists, and without which the first ideas can only make a good critic-not a painter."

Rome was to Barry, as it is to all genuine artists, a sacred depository of every production of genius, at the imitation of which he strives as the great object of his life. The spirit which, in after years, distinguished Barry, was very evident even at this early period. The contempt of all authority, the dislike to all the dogmatism of older professors, the hatred of academies, all the wild, odd peculiarities of his disposition, were the causes of anxiety and of dissatisfaction to his friends; and whilst exciting their compassion or their anger, he appears, himself, to have been entirely unconscious of his position. He wrote most feelingly of the fate of a brother artist who had been, in many points of conduct, most similar to himself. Burke, who dreaded the injury which might spring from this most unhappy, because unnoticed infirmity of character, watched every phase of Barry's mind, and endeavoured, by his advice, to guard him from the evils by which he was surrounded. With this intention he wrote to him frequently, and in one of his letters the following noble passages appear :

"Until very lately, I had never heard anything of your proceedings from others; and when I did, it was much less than I had known from yourself that you had been upon ill terms with the artists and virtuosi in Rome without much mention of cause or consequence. If you have improved these unfortunate quarrels to your advancement in your art, you have turned a very disagreeable circumstance to a very capital advantage. However you may have succeeded in this uncommon attempt, permit me to suggest to you, with that friendly liberty which you have always had the goodness to bear from me, that you cannot possibly have always the same success, either with regard to your fortune, or your reputation. Depend upon it, that you will find the same competitions, the same jealousies, the same arts and cabals, the emulations of interest and of fame, and the same agitations and passions here, that you have experienced in Italy; and if they have the same effect on your temper, they will have just the same effects on your interest-and be your merit what it will, you will never be employed to paint a picture. It will be the same in London as at home, and the same in Paris as in London; for the world is pretty nearly alike in all its parts: nay, though it would perhaps be a little inconvenient to me, I had a thousand times rather you should fix your residence in Rome than here, as I should not then have the mortification of seeing with my own eyes a genius of the first rank lost to the world, himself, and his friends-as I certainly must if you do not assume a manner of acting and thinking here totally different from what your letters from Rome have described to me. That you

have had just subjects of indignation always, and of anger often, I do no ways doubt. Who can live in the world without some trial of his patience? But believe me, my dear Barry, that the arms with which the ill dispositions of the world are to be combated, and the qualities with which it is to be reconciled to us, and we reconciled to it, are moderation, gentleness, a little indulgence to others, and a great deal of distrust of ourselves,-which are not qualities of a mean spirit, as some may possibly think them, but virtues of a great and noble kind; and such as dignify our nature as much as they contribute to our repose and fortune; for nothing can be so unworthy of a well-composed soul as to pass away life in bickerings and litigations in snarling and scuffling with every one about us. Again and again, my dear Barry, we must be at peace with our species-if not for their sakes, yet very much for our own. Think what my feelings must be, from my unfeigned regard to you, and from my wishes that your talents might be of use, when I see what the inevitable consequence must be of your persevering in what has hitherto been your course ever since I knew you, and which you will permit me to trace out to you before-hand. You will come here, you will observe what the artists are doing, and you will sometimes speak a disapprobation in plain words, and sometimes in a no less expressive silence. By degrees you will produce some of your own works. They will be variously criticised; you will defend them; you will abuse those that have attacked you; expostulations, discussions, letters, possibly challenges, will go forward; you will shun your brethren-they will shun you. In the mean time, gentlemen will shun your friendship for fear of being engaged in your quarrels; you will fall into distresses which will only aggravate your disposition for farther quarrels; you will be obliged, for maintenance, to do any thing for any body; your very talents will depart for want of hope and encouragement; and you will go out of the world fretted, disappointed, and ruined."

Amongst his brother artists he was neither popular nor unpopular, but in Smith's gossiping Life of Nollekens the following story is told :

66

Barry the historical painter, who was extremely intimate with Nollekens at Rome, took the liberty one night, when they were about to leave the English Coffee House, to exchange hats with him. Barry's hat was edged with lace, and Nollekens' was a very shabby plain one. Upon his returning the hat next morning, he was requested by Nollekens to let him know why he left him his gold laced hat Why, to tell you the truth, my dear Joey,' answered Barry, 'I fully expected assassination last night, and I was to have been known by my gold laced hat.' This villainous transaction, which might have proved fatal to Nollekens, I have often heard him relate, and he generally added, Its what the Old Bailey people would call a true bill against Jem.'"*

6

Smyth's Life of Nollekens, Vol. I, p. 8.

This story, in our mind, is little better than a gross and unfounded falsehood, entirely opposed to all Barry's habits, and representing him in a most shameful and degrading positi n.

In the month of April, 1770, our painter, having completed his studies, left Rome for England, and visited all the galleries of note or reputation upon his route. At Turin he was disappointed in the Guidos, and "Rubens, Rembrandt, Teniers, and Vandyke were without the pales of his church." At Milan, he went to see Da Vinci's Last Supper, but found the picture in the process of cleaning and repainting. This, as a matter of course, roused Barry's anger, and he argued with, and lectured the monks for their barbarism.

He

He arrived safely in London, and as his time had been fully employed in Rome, he found the advantages which spring from the cultivation of literature in connection with art. had written a very able treatise upon Gothic architecture, and had prepared notes of great value upon the artistic skill of the ancients; from the latter he afterwards derived those arguments which he employed in refuting the theories of Winkelmann. He had, during these five years, done very little perceptible, or likely to add, in the opinion of the world, to his reputation, but, in the quiet hours of his own peculiar and brooding thoughtfulness, he had laid up the seeds of those grand harvests of genius, in after years to flourish so gloriously. There was not a beauty in any famous picture or piece of sculpture unnoticed by him; he copied, in out-line, all the great statues of Rome, and so intent was he upon his studies that he painted only two pictures in oils during his five years of pupilage— Philoctetes and Adam and Eve. Thus, in the slow and toilsome progress of his early studies, he curbed his fancy, and in the "ever-living Art," his soul acknowledged a superior in the might of dead genius, breathing again in its own bright creations; amidst the galleries of Rome he learned to worship at the shrine of ancient art, and measuring his cotemporaries by the standard of the antique, he despised their noblest efforts. With him the ancient masters were gods, their pictures and their statues were alone worthy of his regard, he would be their high priest, and that feeling which, in the breasts of other men, would have been but admiration, became, in his fervid soul, extaticism and idolatry.

Thus formed in mind he arrived in England; Burke was still his friend, as firm and genial as ever; and to prove that

his life in Rome had not been mispent, Barry prepared to startle the world with a picture, as ambitious and grand in its subject, as a young painter could possibly select. He was resolved that his work should exhibit all the graces of form, all the charms of beauty, all the clever combinations of sky, and water, and, sun-light, and, daring to match himself with the mightiest masters of antiquity, he painted Venus Rising from the Sea.

His next picture was Jupiter and Juno; but, in the year 1773, the artistic knowledge of the English people was as uncultivated and as unrefined as their taste in dress or in gastronomy. Manchester, and Liverpool, and Bristol, and Edinburgh, and Dublin, possess now their annual exhibitions of Painting and of Sculpture; Art-Unions, Mechanics Institutes, and popular Literary Associations, have refined the minds of our people; and that which was, eighty years ago, but a wonder, "the effect," as Johnson said, "of novelty upon ignorance," is now an object of attraction and of honest laudable gratification to the minds of our intelligent mechanics. The causes of this change are so many and so various, that it is impossible to specify them; but the importation of foreign works of art, the progress which the popular mind and free education ever make in a free country, are the chief sources whence springs the advancement in public taste. That Barry lived before his time, none who know the history of his life-struggle can doubt. His views of art differed from those of the leading painters of his age; his unbending, unconciliating, disposition, repelled many amateurs who might have agreed with his theory in part, but he was then as dogmatic in requiring credence for all his theories of painting, as in after years he became when demanding belief for all the teachings of his religion.

His painting of Adam and Eve, which he had commenced in Italy, but finished in England, was equally unlucky with his two earlier paintings in suiting the public taste; and when some few years afterwards he painted his Death of General Wolfe, all the world stared, at the fancy of representing a general and soldiers of the time of George the Third contending naked against the enemy. Had Barry been less original, or had he, like Robert Southey, been content that his productions should live in the minds of some half dozen men of his own time, whilst hoping, nay believing, that the next generation would fully appreciate his objects and his merits,