THE ARTIST.

I was one day walking through Finsbury-square. There sat a pale, sick woman, meekly and sorrowfully bending her eyes to the earth, while a child slept in her arms, upon whose thin pallid features were the traces of as much misery as can fall to the lot of sinless infancy. I had been reading that very morning chap. v. b. iii. part 3, of Paley's "Moral and Political Philosophy," and all the better feelings of my nature had responded to every argument he employed for enforcing the duty of alms-giving. But I rather think it must have been a grand field-day with the beggars; that they had all turned out upon some special occasion; for I met eleven cripples, four widows with five fatherless children a-piece, three starving industrious mechanics, in clean white aprons, and one blind sailor, who had lost his "precious sight" by lightning, in the Bay of Biscay, between St Paul's and the Old Jewry. It was this, I suppose, that soured the milk of human kindness within me, and made me pass, with an unpitying heart, the simple, touching appeal of the poor creature I have described, on whose lap lay a written paper with these words only; "Have compassion on us; we are destitute !" She asked no charity, either by word or look; but, with folded arms round her baby, and her head drooping over it, she trusted all to the tale which this little scroll told of her condition. Yet I passed on!

I blush while I write this confession of cold, miserable selfishness, that could, even for a moment, stifle the yearnings of the lowest species of humanity, upon the paltry plea, that perhaps I had (for I did not know I had) given my mite already to the unworthy. It is curious how conscience keeps tugging at a man to hold him back when he is going in a wrong path. Every step I took towards the City Road, leaving that poor silent suppliant behind unrelieved, I felt I was walking under the constantly increasing burden of a self-accusing spirit-a consciousness that I had left something undone, which it was necessary, for my own comfort, I should return and do. I obeyed my monitor. I returned; and, as if to show me to myself in my true colours, I saw a Greenwich pensioner, with a face as hard as a cannon-ball, and a look as crabbed as if he had just been fined a day's allowance of grog, drop even his mite into the woman's lap. The rewarding look with which her eyes followed the maimed veteran, as he hobbled away on his wooden leg, smote me.

It would be a piece of tedious egotism to relate the conversation

I held with this distressed creature, after I had dispensed my bounty to her. But the scene to which it led I will describe.

It was with some difficulty I prevailed upon her to disclose her abode, or rather, to consent that she should conduct me to it; and, notwithstanding the sharp rebuke I had already received, in pro portion to her reluctance the feeling grew strong within me that 1 was still the dupe of imposture. At length she yielded, but with a mournful shake of the head, which might be interpreted, I thought, two ways; either that she was conscious she could not escape detection, or satisfied that I should find her tale of misery too true. She arose, and I followed her slow feeble steps till we arrived at street, leading into the New Road, near Pentonville.

She stopped at No. - in that street; and, looking at me as she knocked at the door, said faintly, "We live here, sir."

I had hardly time to notice the apparent comfort and respectability of the outward appearance of the house, before the door was opened by a fine-looking lad about thirteen, whose dress denoted that species of poverty which is the wreck of former competence. He was old enough to know what misery means beyond the mere endurance of its sufferings and privations; and his countenance, therefore, wore that melancholy expression which is stamped by the habitual presence of sad thoughts. Yet there was a sparkling gladness in his eye to welcome back his mother, mingled with a timid inquiring glance at the stranger who accompanied her.

No words passed between them, and I followed my conductress silently into the parlour. Here was my first evidence of the destitution which the paper she had displayed proclaimed. There was nothing but the bare walls; literally nothing else: not an article of furniture of any description.

"Take your sister, George," said the miserable mother," and lay her" tears choked her utterance. She might have added, "on the ground!" for, as I afterwards learned, bed there was none, nor chair, nor table, nor aught, save the floor, for its restingplace. The poor fellow took the infant, yet asleep, and while his own tears started at those of his mother, left the room.

I heard a heavy tread above, as of one pacing up and down with a hurried, impetuous step.

"It is my husband," said she, anticipating the question which my look, I suppose, betrayed was upon my lips.

"Your husband! What is he?"

"An artist."

"An artist!" I repeated, in a tone which I dare say expressed what I felt; for, judging from all that had occurred, I expected to

find the lowest branch of the art of colouring, dignified with a name which it has grown into a fashion to apply to the most consummate masters of the pencil.

"Yes, Sir," she replied, with something of offended pride, “an artist; and such an enthusiast of his art, that it has turned his brain. But I will go to him, and see if he will admit you."

She quitted the apartment, and the next moment I heard a loud laughing, clapping of hands, and vehement talking. I could not distinguish what was said; and before I had time to consider how I should act in the presence of a mad painter, quick steps descending the stairs apprised me of a visit for which I was wholly unprepared. The door flew open, and in rushed the husband followed by his wife entreating him to be calm, and assuring him that he was mistaken.

He made a sudden halt when he saw me, and with a wild, scrutinizing glare, surveyed me from head to foot. I was at once convinced of the disordered state of his mind, and wished our relative positions changed; I between him and the door, instead of his being between me and the only means of an escape, if it should be necessary, which the room presented, unless I made a precipitate retreat from the window into the area. He was tall, thin, pale, and haggard in appearance, with a beard that had not been shaved for a month; and had on a faded green great coat, one sleeve of which was half torn away, and the other hanging in tatters. In his left hand he held an ivory palette; his right grasped-not his pencilbut a large iron poker!

It does not require the experience of a lunatic asylum to know that insane persons are best managed by gentleness; and with a sort of instinctive consciousness of this, I saluted him very courteously, taking off my hat to render the homage which was due to the master of the house from a stranger. The effect of my politeness answered my most sanguine expectations. He returned my bow with a great deal of exuberant dignity; dropped his poker, which hitherto he had held as if prepared either to repel or commit an aggression, and used it as a walking-stick, while with a stately measured step he approached the farther corner of the room where I had planted myself, and where, at that moment, I should have been well pleased to find the wall opening behind me, for the convenience of retreating two steps to each one of his in advance.

"Ha! ha!" he exclaimed, when he was so close to me, that if I had not held my head as erect as a grenadier of the Guards, the bristles of his month's beard would have entered my own chin. "Ha! ha! do you think I would let them touch the Last Judg

ment?" and he brandished his poker over his head: "No! the rascals! They took every thing else; and I stood by and laughed to see what trouble they were at for my convenience. What cared I for tables, chairs, beds? They were in my way. But when they would have laid hands upon the Last Judgment ! Martha,” he continued, turning to his wife, who stood trembling and dejected at his side; "What did I say to the fellow who looked like Michael Angelo, when he came into the room for the Last Judgment? I knocked him down, Sir," addressing me again, and elevating his poker-"A judgment upon him, ha! ha! but not the last; for then I took him thus," seizing me by the collar, "and thrust him into the street, ha! ha! ha!"

"You did perfectly right," said I, with as much composure as I could possibly assume in my very awkward situation, and devoutly hoping he would not mistake me for Michael Angelo coming for his Last Judgment.

"Right!" he exclaimed. "Had he been an R. A. or the President of the R. A. himself, I would have felled him to the ground like an ox, or any man who dared to remove that canvass from the easel, till 1 had painted in the nose of Alexander: he is the principal figure in the fore-ground. If you are an artist, I need not tell you that to paint the end of a nose well-true to nature-is the climax of perfection in a portrait. Sir Joshua could never do it; West failed in all his noses; Sir Thomas is the only man in England, except myself, who can really paint a nose. Look even at the noses of the Prophets and Sibyls of Michael Angelo, in the Sistine Chapel-they are lumps of putty, Sir, stuck on by a glazier. YOURS would be a very difficult nose to paint!" he added, fixing his eyes upon my nose with an earnest gaze of so equivocal a meaning, that I wished at the moment Nature had defrauded me of that prominent feature.

All this time he had never once shifted his position; neither could I mine. His wife continued to stand close to us, looking at me every now and then with an expression of countenance which silently, but intelligibly, conjured me not to cross him; while the son, with his infant sister in his arms, appeared at the door, surveying the scene in an attitude of intense curiosity, and deep affliction for the state of his wretched parent.

At length he yielded to the persuasions of his wife, and consented that I should go up stairs and see the Last Judgment, after making me promise I would not approach nearer to it than he should point out. He led the way, shouldering his poker like a musket: the wife followed next, and I brought up the rear. When I entered the room I was amazed! It was stripped of every article of furni

ture; but in the centre, stretched upon the easel, stood a magnificent painting unfinished, as I saw at the first glance, (and in more respects than the nose of Alexander,) of the Last Judgment. The grace and expression, united with grandeur of form, in the principal figures; the variety of the subordinate parts; the effective grouping; the rich yet complete harmony of colour; and in some of the faces, the appalling passions that were portrayed, constituted altogether as fine a specimen of modern art as I had ever looked upon.

The burst of admiration which escaped from me was so sincere, so fervent, that it fell like an electrical shock upon the shattered nerves and overwrought brain of the unhappy artist. He burst into tears. With passionate sobs, with shrieks of alternate delight and sorrow, he uttered a thousand wild exclamations, half ludicrous, half heart-rending, as he now gloried in his work, now execrated the age in which he lived, insensible as it was to his merits, and now deplored that all his genius had not been able to feed his children!

"Ha! ha! Sir," he cried, (throwing away his poker, rubbing his hands, and springing like a tiger from me to the picture, and from the picture back again to me, as he spoke.)-" Ha! ha! Sir! Talk of your Titians, your Caraccis, your Raffaels, even the great Florentine himself, Michael Angelo! Oh, God! Had they given me bread the while, for me and mine, I would have shed a glory upon my country brighter than that which now blazes over Italy! Io sono pittore! Look here! observe this sweeping outline-and here, what anatomy! how finely that muscle is displayed! how I laboured to produce that! I have worked while the world slept, and worshipped my art in the stillness of those hours when the fainting soul languished for repose! Ay, Sir,-Martha can tell you-I lived but at my easel. Do you see the ghastly expressions of that face? how beautifully it contrasts with the serene, seraphic, spiritual joy, that beams from the features of that lovely maiden! This head conceived, this hand executed it all—and yet look at me! I am mad-mad-mad!" pressing his clenched hands violently to his forehead: "for I have been left to dream of visions that are gone, and to feed upon myself, till now I sometimes seem to see my own heart's blood covering that canvass instead of the colours I laid on!”

He became more composed, after this ebullition of his feelings, and gathered himself into an attitude of earnest contemplation of the picture. I was myself gazing at it with increasing admiration, when he suddenly burst into a loud laugh.

"Ha! ha! ha! What would Michael Angelo say, if he saw