never allow yourselves to be seen with a worse than you wore for the painter! Whenever you feel ill-tempered, remember that you look ugly; and be assured that every emotion of fretfulness, of ill-humor, of anger, of irritability, of impatience, of pride, haughtiness, envy, malice, any unkind, any uncharitable, any ungenerous feeling, lessens the likeness to your picture, and not only deforms you while it lasts, but leaves its trace behind; for the effect of the passions upon the face is more rapid and more certain than that of time." Or if Barry did not hold these opinions, he, as a Roman Catholic, and as a believer in the watching of guardian angels, must have felt with Leigh Hunt, who writes: "Mr. Hazlitt has said somewhere, of the portrait of a beautiful female with a noble countenance, that it seems as if an unhandsome action, would be impossible in its presence. It is not so much for restraint's sake, as for the sake of diffusiveness of heart, or the going out of ourselves, that we would recommend pictures; but, among other advantages, this also, of reminding us of our duties, would doubtless be one; and if reminded with charity, the effect, though perhaps small in most instances, would still be something. We have read of a Catholic money-lender, who, when he was going to cheat a customer, always drew a veil over the portrait of his favorite saint. Here was a favorite vice, far more influential than the favorite saint; and yet we are of opinion that the money-lender was better for the saint than he would have been without him. It left him faith in something; he was better for it in the intervals; he would have treated his daughter the better for it, or his servant, or his dog. There was a bit of heaven in his room,-a sun-beam to shine into a corner of his heart, however he may have shut the window against it, when heaven was not to look on. The companionship of anything greater or better than ourselves must do us good, unless we are destitute of all modesty or patience. And a picture is a companion, and the next thing to the presence of what it represents." At length, on the 6th of February, 1806, Barry felt, for the first time in his life, seriously indisposed, and was seized, without forewarning, by his fatal illness. Of his death and last hours, Robert Southey gives the following account : - "I knew Barry, and have been admitted into his den in his worst (that is to say, his maddest) days, when he was employed upon his Pandora. He wore at that time an old coat of green baize, but from which time had taken all the green that incrustations of paint and dirt had not covered. His wig was one which you might suppose he had borrowed from a scarecrow; all round it there projected a fringe of his own grey hair. He lived alone, in a house which was never cleaned; and he slept in a bedstead, with no other furniture than a blanket nailed on the one side. I wanted him to visit me. 'No,' he said, he would not go out by day, because he could not spare time from his great picture; and if he went out in the evening, the Academicians would waylay him and murder him.' In this solitary, sullen life he continued till he fell ill, very probably for want of food sufficiently nourishing; and after lying two or three days under his blanket, he had just strength enough to crawl to his own door, open it, and lay himself down with a paper in his hand, on which he had written his wish to be carried to the house of Mr. Carlisle (Sir Anthony), in Soho Square. There he was taken care of; and the danger from which he had thus escaped, seems to have cured his mental hallucinations. He cast his slough afterwards; appeared decently dressed in his own grey hair, and mixed in such society as he liked. I should have told you that, a little before his illness, he had, with much persuasion, been induced to pass a night at some person's house in the country. When he came down to breakfast the next morning, and was asked how he had rested, he said, remarkably well, he had not slept in sheets for many years, and really he thought it was a very comfortable thing. He interlarded his conversation with oaths as expletives, but it was pleasant to converse with him; there was a frankness and animation about him which won good will as much as his vigorous intellect commanded respect. There is a story of his having refused to paint portraits, and saying, in answer to applications, that there was a man in Leicester-square who did. But this he said was false; for that he would at any time have painted portraits, and have been glad to paint them. God bless you. Yours very truly, R.S." He died upon the 22nd day of February, in the sixty-fifth year of his age. By the Royal Academy his death was unnoticed; the Society of Arts allowed his body to be placed in their room, which his hand had adorned, and from which it was borne to St. Paul's, where it now moulders, commemorated by a monument, for the erection of which Sir Robert Peel-the first baronet-paid two hundred pounds. We have already named a few of Barry's chief pictures; there is, in the vestibule of the Fine Art Gallery of the Royal Dublin Society, an original picture painted by him, representing the scene in Cymbeline, in which Iachimo watches Imogen sleeping. Barry's writings, with a memoir of his life prefixed, were published in two volumes, quarto, in the year 1809, by Cadell and Davies, London. They should be on the book-shelves, and the principles which they contain in the mind, of every artist who desires to advance his profession. * Southey's Life and Correspondence, Vol. VI., p. 54. We have selected this particular period for the publication of our memoir of Barry, because the time seems to us peculiarly appropriate. Ninety-three years ago he came to Dublin for the purpose of exhibiting his picture of St. Patrick Baptizing the King of Cashel; he placed it in the room of the Dublin Society; he became a pupil of their schools, and brought honor upon them by his life-labors. From his days to the present, many distinguished men have gone forth from that school, and in the fame of the Irish born painters and sculptors, the Society may well feel proud of their elèves. Amongst the many students of promise who now attend the drawing-school, and school of design, amongst the thousands of our youths who will, within the next three months, throng the halls and galleries of our Crystal Palace, there will be many who possess a taste, if not a genius, for painting and for sculpture. As they pause before the grand pictures, ancient and modern, that may grace the walls; as they linger before Barry's Imogen, and recall the struggles of his life, let them remember wisely his self-denial, his patient toil, his lonely studies, his honest-hearted love of all the noble, manly, traits of his fellow-men, and his honorable care in all matters of debt and of money; let them recollect the high dignity of the painter's art, noble as the poet's, inspiring as the musician's, called in other days to aid God's Priest in exciting the languid devotion of the sinner; leaving to posterity the likeness of great heroes, or transmitting to the future those goddess features, the beauty which "makes beautiful old rhyme," till the world knows not whether there dwells a deeper charm in the glowing, breathing, magic canvas of the painter, or in the glorious hymn that rises from the fullswelling heart of the poet. To compare the poet and the painter is but an idiot's play; each in his rich boon, heaven's own gift of genius, is the steward of the Almighty; and when there lives upon the painter's canvas, when there breathes in the poet's song, some conception that proves God within our breasts, ineffable as in Nature, the light of Intellect, rising above the mists of mortality, shines forth in all the primal brilliancy of its origin, "And bravely furnish'd all abroad to fling The winged shafts of truth, To throng with stately blooms the breathing spring The moral of James Barry's life is the most melancholy in all the biographies of Art. George Morland, regaining transient gleams of intellect through drunkenness, is not more sad; but each instance proves that good sense, good temper, moderation and patience, must be combined with genius, else its possession may become a close-clinging, life-long, curse. The world never yet trampled true genius in the dust, but, alas! true genius has but too often grovelled so deeply in the mire, that the world has crushed it unwittingly and unwillingly. ART. III. THE STREETS OF DUBLIN. MOLESWORTH-STREET, Kildare-street, and their vicinity, stand With charms resistless wound the heart; When from her eyes Love shoots his dart." Park observes," that he is likely to have written more from having turned this so well." His successor, Richard, third viscount Molesworth, designed by his father for the law, fled from the Temple to Flanders, and served as a volunteer in the allied army there until he obtained an ensigncy, and was appointed aide-de-camp to the duke of Marlborough, whose life he saved at the battle of Ramillies in 1706, a circumstance unfairly suppressed by English writers. After serving with distinction throughout all the campaigns in Flanders, and against the Scots at Preston, he was appointed lieutenant general and commander-in-chief of the troops in Ireland, and field-marshal of his majesty's forces; his death took place in 1758, five years subsequent to which lady Molesworth and several of his children fell victims to an accidental fire in London. The building of Molesworth-street was completed before the middle of the last century, and its inhabitants were then people of the highest rank in the city. Of Richard Parsons, first earl of Rosse, one of the earliest residents in the street, a writer in 1762 has left the following notice : "The late earl of Ross was, in character and disposition, like the humorous earl of Rochester; he had an infinite fund of wit, great spirits, and a liberal heart; was fond of all the vices which the beau monde call pleasures, and by those means first impaired his fortune, as much as he possibly could do; and finally, his health beyond repair. To recite any part of his wit here is impossible, though I have heard much of it, but as it either tended to blasphemy, or at the best obscenity, it is better where it is. A nobleman could not, in so censorious a place as Dublin, lead a life of rackets, brawls, and midnight confusion, without being a general topic for reproach, and having fifty thousand faults invented to complete the number of those he had: nay, some asserted, that he dealt with the devil; es tablished a hell-fire club at the Eagle tavern on Cork-hill;* and that one Worsdale, a mighty innocent facetious painter, who was *For a notice of this tavern, see the account of Cork-hill, IRISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, Vol. II. 327. James Worsdale, above referred to, studied under sir Godfrey Kneller, with whose niece he eloped. "In the beginning of his manhood he went to Ireland; where he met with more success as an artist than he deserved; but his poignant table chat and conviviality begat him many admirers, among whom lord Blayney stood the most conspicuous. It was his custom, when a portrait was finished, and not paid for, to chalk the surface over with intersected lines, which conveyed the appearance of the subject being in prison; and this was exhibited continually in his painting room, until shame or pride induced the parties concerned to liberate the effigy, by paying the artist. I have heard it was he who introduced the practice of demanding one half of the general sum, at the first sitting. His talents as a painter were inconsiderable. He was appointed master painter to the board of ordnance, through the influence of sir Edward Walpole, who had been accused of a detestable crime; but Worsdale discovered the conspiracy against his patron's honour; and by great address and incessant pains brought the delinquents to justice. To effect this, he lodged on Saffron-hill, as a hay-maker, from Munster; and in the Mint, Southwark, as the widow of a recruiting sergeant from Sligo." The manuscript viceregal accounts, in our possession, contain the following entries relative to Worsdale. |