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 or 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 äversion, 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.

1 have

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. 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.

His first attempts were portraits of his school companions: these were made chiefly with the pencil, and of a small size: but though rough and rude, as all such things must be, they were not without a certain freedom and vigour of outline; and it is said that discerning persons saw in them the fokens of a spirit original and unborrowed. Cheered by such praise, and animated by an inward consciousness of talent, he sought to make nearer approaches than black lead could suffice for to the pictures which he admired. One of his neighbours, a house-painter, supplied him with such colours as he imagined necessary; and, after many a secret and unseen effort, he produced a portrait, in which he imitated, not unhappily, the light and shade of a picture by Reynolds. This was shown to the village school-master, who happened to have some taste in art; he liked it so well, that he took it to Lord Mulgrave, who, pleased with the attempt, wished to see more sketches: these he liked still better, and sending for the young artist, was so pleased with his modest simplicity of manner, that he promised to keep him in mind.

These were not words of course or of courtesy: Lord Mulgrave took the surest way to prove the genius of young Jackson, and advance his fortune. On his return to London, he showed the sketches, in pencil and in oil, to Sir George Beaumont, by whom they were pronounced to be no common things; and words of encouragement, and painting materials of the right kind, were now liberaily supplied. Though Jackson still continued at his trade, he gave up all his mind, as well as the little leisure he had, to the study of painting: he read dissertations and criticisms on pictures; he compared the living nature before him with that of the works in the collections of his patrons; and, with a fresh eye and increase of knowledge, renewed his labours in lead and in oil. Of the offspring of those days of youthful hope and toil, I can give little or no ac

count. The poet burns his early verses when the muse supplies better; and the artist destroys frequently the first gropings of his fancy, when knowledge helps him to something more graceful or lofty. Among the chaos of his works, at his too early death, was found one head painted in the colours which his friend the house-painter supplied; and men of taste were not wanting who perceived even in it the dawn of that deep and daring mode of colouring in which he afterward excelled. It was, perhaps, on works of a more decided character than this that Sir George Beaumont founded his judgment, when he united with the Mulgrave family in purchasing up two years of Jackson's unexpired apprenticeship. The attempts with the blacklead pencil which brought him first into public notice were of those days; and, while he was yet young, he was considered as one of the most skilful drawers of likenesses among living artists.

The first use which Jackson made of his freedom was to put himself on the road to London. On his arrival he presented himself to Sir George Beaumont, saying that a few portraits which he had drawn, in little, for the Mulgrave family and others, had put some money in his pocket, and that he wished to study in the schools of the Royal Academy, where he would have good advice and approved models. "You have done wisely," said Sir George; "London is the place for talents such as yours: but you must lay down a regular plan of study; you must copy the best pictures during the day, and avail yourself of the advantages of the Royal Academy during the evening. You have done much for yourself; but you have much to learn from others. To enable you to do all this you shall have fifty pounds a year while you are a student, and live in my house; you will soon require no aid."

If there are few young men equal in merit to Jackson, it must be confessed that patrons such as Sir