with our fellow-citizens, and that in particular your business is to paint and not to dispute."

William Burke appears to have had less faith in the efficacy of advice, for after venturing a little on the same subject to Barry, he consolingly adds, he might as well have spared himself his labour, for if such was Barry's nature, it would always remain so-the event proved him the better philosopher. Barry, however, when disengaged from these petty contentions, set in vehemently to his studies, and investigated the great works of ancient and modern art, with profound and indefatigable attention. In his modes of study, as in every thing else, he was peculiar; his drawings from the antique were made by means of a patent delineator, a mechanical process which saves all trouble to the eye and hand. Barry considered the spontaneous correctness of drawing, acquired by the habitual exercise of those organs, a thing of small comparative importance; but by minutely dividing and subdividing, enlarging and diminishing, the studies made by the above-named method, he sought to establish in his mind an abstract canon of proportion.-Barry, indeed, delighted in the idealities of his art, and shrunk from the grossness of executive excellence: nevertheless, he made some copies of Titian, which satisfied his ambition, on the subject of colour; and if he was mistaken in supposing that the copyings of Titian alone can make a colourist, without perpetual recurrence to nature, he by no means stands alone in that error. But of his ardour and success in the study of those masters, whose qualities were more congenial to his own, Raphael and Michael Angelo, his subsequent works furnish an illustrious evidence.

He remained in Rome five years, and was elected during that period, a member of the Clementine Academy at Bologna, on which occasion he painted as his picture of reception, Philoctetes in the island of Lemnos. He returned to England in 1770, destitute of all but art, yet elate in the consciousness of his talents and acquirements, and panting for an opportunity of executing some great public work,

which should serve at once as his own monument, and as a vindication of his country against the aspersions of metaphysical drivellers (Winckelman and others), who had asserted its utter incapacity for the historical branch of the fine arts. A design was however formed of decorating St. Paul's Cathedral, with the works of our most eminent painters and sculptors, and Barry was to have been employed on the subject of, "The Jews rejecting Christ when Pilate entreats his release;" but the scheme was discouraged, and its probable success can now be only a subject of speculation.

The year after his return, he exhibited his picture of Adam and Eve, and in the year following, his Venus Anadyomene; this picture is unquestionably, in all that relates to form and character, an exquisite personification of female grace and beauty. In 1775, he published an Inquiry into the real and imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of Arts in England; this work is equally valuable for its research, its acuteness, and its patriotism; but Barry hastened to the practical proof, that neither fog nor frost can repress the aspirations of genius. He proposed to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, to paint gratuitously, a series of pictures, allegorically illustrating the culture and progress of human knowledge, which now decorate the great room of the Society; he persisted in this great work amidst poverty and privation*, and completed it in seven years. Whatever may be its deficiencies in colour and execution, it exhibits a mastery of design, a grasp of thought, and a sublimity of conception; with such an appropriation of those powers to the purposes of ethical utility, as secures to the Author a triple wreath of immortality as an artist, a philanthropist, and a philosopher. In a country like England, when an individual was found who had devoted himself to a protracted martyrdom, in an attempt to add the last gem to her diadem, to crown her pre-eminence in literature and

Subsisting the greater part of the time on bread and apples.

arms, with the honours of historic art, it might have been expected, that such an individual had some slight claim on her gratitude, and that from the plethoric superabundance of her wealth, she would have dropped a mite, which, however insignificant in itself, would have secured her enthusiastic champion from future indigence and embarrassment. Barry's performance passed before the public vision, with as little observance as the last new pantomime, and was certainly less productive; the profits of the exhibition amounted to 500l. to which 200l. were added by a vote of the Society, for whose rooms they had been painted, and this sum comprises nearly the whole produce of Barry's professional career. A man of more constitutional placidity than Barry, might have felt irritated, that after having expended on a public work all the fruits of his study, and the energies of his youth, his labours had left him no chance of independence, unless that independence should be purchased by a sacrifice of all the comforts and conveniences of life. We regret to add what truth extorts from us, that Barry's natural irritability seems to have increased from this period, even to a degree of exasperation; and that his powers of mind, at least in what relates to the exercise of his art, seem to have sunk in a gradual declension. His picture of Pandora, which we gladly refrain from commenting on, is too explicit a proof of this last assertion; and his disputes with the Academy are as strong an evidence of the former. He had been elected professor of painting in 1782, and almost from the period of his instalment, he had been engaged in a perpetual contest with his fellow-academicians: these dissensions became at last so insufferable, that the council preferred against him a formal body of charges, and in a general assembly of the Academics, the offences of the professor were considered of such magnitude, that he was divested of his office, and expelled the Academy.

Soon after this event, the Earl of Buchan set on foot a subscription, which amounted to about 1000l. with which

VOL. I.

his friends purchased an annuity for his life; but his death prevented his reaping any benefit from this design. The manner of his death is thus related by his biographer :"On the evening of Thursday, Feb. 6, 1806, he was seized, as he entered the house where he usually dined, with the cold fit of a pleuritic fever, of so intense a degree, that all his faculties were suspended, and he unable to articulate or move. Some cordial was administered to him; and, on his coming a little to himself, he was taken in a coach to the door of his own house*, which, the keyhole being plugged with dirt and pebbles, as had been often done before by the malice, or perhaps the roguery of boys in the neighbourhood, it was impossible to open. The night being dark, and he shivering under the progress of his disease, his friends thought it advisable to drive away, without loss of time, to the hospitable mansion of Mr. Bononni. By the kindness of that good family, a bed was procured in a neighbouring house, to which he was immediately conveyed. Here he desired to be left, and locked himself up, unfortunately, for forty hours, without the least medical assistance. What took place in the mean time, he could give but little account of, as he represented himself to be delirious, and only recollected his being tortured with a burning pain in his side, and with difficulty of breathing. In this short time was the death-blow given, which, by the prompt and timely aid of copious bleedings, might have been averted; but, with this aid, such had been the re-action of the hot fit succeeding the rigours, and the violence of the inflammation on the pleura, that an effusion of lymph had taken place, as appeared afterwards upon dissection. In the afternoon of Saturday, Feb. 8, he rose and crawled forth to relate his complaint to the writer of this account. was pale, breathless, and tottering, as he entered the room, with a dull pain in his side, a cough, short and

He

A lycographic sketch of which, from an original drawing, we present the reader with.