that? By Jupiter! that old man on the right, whom I mean for a Cardinal, has too much of the sly, demure look of a Quaker. There, there, go, go! I must not be interrupted any longer; we want money; and if they would empty before me the coffers of the Bank of England, they should not have it till I have bestowed my last touches upon the nose of Alexander, and painted up the Cardinal's face to the true piety of a well-paid churchman. There, go, go!" I obeyed, and leaving the maniac to his moody fancies, returned with his wife to the parlour, where I received from her all the particulars of her husband's calamitous history. His name was and he had not yet attained his five-andthirtieth year. He was what is called a self-taught artist; that is, one who embodied the conceptions of genius, (which are from Heaven,) in the same way as those men did who had no masters to study, being themselves the great originals in their art, and the models, by universal consent, for those who came after them. Such men were self-taught, for where were they to find teachers? And such self-tuition, which is but another word for inspiration, is the only school wherein the rarer works of Nature can study. In this sense Demosthenes was a self-taught orator among the Greeks, and Cicero among the Romans; Homer was a self-taught poet; and Shakspeare, and Cervantes, Milton, and Moliere, were self-taught; if by the phrase we are to understand that which, if it be not selftaught, is incommunicable. But to return from this digression to my crazed, self-taught, artist. His father was a wealthy merchant; and designing his only son for the church, his education had been completed at Cambridge. But he was born a painter; and renouncing, with the recklessness and impetuosity of a youthful mind, goaded onwards by the fiery impulses of one predominant, one devouring passion, he renounced every thing for it. This was an offence not at first to be forgiven by a father who had as strong a passion of another kind; who would rather have seen his son's name enrolled among the Tillotsons, Sherlocks, Taylors, and Barrows, of the English hierarchy, than heard him hailed by the general voice as the Raffael or Titian of his country. But there was doubtless a pardon that might have been slowly won from the parental heart, had not every hold upon it been dissevered by a second offence, that of marrying a beautiful, virtuous, and amiable girl, who was as poor as poverty herself in all things else. Pride discarded him from his home, and pride kept him voluntarily a stranger to it ever after. He had now to struggle with adversity under all its most trying afflictions. He could not stoop to make the noble art to which he had devoted himself a trading commodity among the shopkeepers of the Metropolis. He disdained to colour canvass for wages that would barely suffice to maintain him. He chose rather, (when the small fund was exhausted which his father placed at his disposal in renouncing him, and which had been husbanded most thriftily,) to depend for precarious subsistence upon slender loans solicited from former friends, or acquaintance, while finishing his first serious effort in historical composition. The subject was a fine one -Oliver Cromwell surveying the dead body of Charles I. the night after his execution.* It was exhibited. The best judges were struck with its grandeur and poetical conception as a whole, and with the felicitous power displayed in many of its details. It soon found a purchaser at the modest price demanded by the artist, who was thus enabled to discharge his obligations to his friends, and provide for immediate wants. In this way he continued to wrestle with his fate for several years, alternately a borrower and a payer, as his various pieces were bought. He buried himself meanwhile in solitude; for no where can a man live so solitary as in a crowded city, especially if he be poor. It is there only he may be one of thousands, without one of the thousands amid whom he moves knowing enough of him to call him by his name. His ambition was of the true quality; incapable of repose or satisfaction; discontented with all that it achieved; eager for all that its restless aspirings aimed at, and confident that all was within its reach. He denied himself rest, almost food; frequently sat at his easel eighteen or twenty hours together; and during that time contented himself with a few biscuits, or a little fruit, to rally his sinking energies. Then, fevered and exhausted, he would throw himself on his bed; not to sleep, but to dream and talk of the visions of his waking thoughts. This ceaseless labour, this intense musing upon bright images of renown that were incessantly streaming into his mind, uniting with the distraction caused by pecuniary embarrassments, first shattered his health, and finally unsettled his reason! His wife imagined she perceived occasional symptoms of a disturbed intellect long before she was summoned to witness an alarming evidence of it. One day she heard him shouting and dancing furiously in his * "While the assassinates that crept up and down afraid of every man they met, pointed at as monsters in nature, finished not their treason when they had ended his martyrdom, one (O. C.) to feed his eyes with cruelty, and satisfy his solicitous ambition, curiously surveyed the murdered carcase, when it was brought in a coffin to Whitehall, and to assure himself the King was quite dead, with his fingers searched the wound whether the head were fully severed from the body or no."-Lloyd's Memoirs. room. She hastened to him. What was her dismay, when she saw him with a large carving knife in his hand, and the floor strewed with the shreds of three pictures for which he was to be paid a considerable sum when finished; but which, with the habitual improvidence of his character, he had suffered to remain unfinished for months, (he and his family all but starving meanwhile,) because he had begun, and was concentrating his whole soul upon the execution of, the Last Judgment! He had slashed them into ribands, and was exulting over his achievement with the boisterous rejoicing of a man who had vanquished some tormenting evil that had been pursuing him at every turn. When he perceived his wife, he pointed to the bits of painted canvass, exclaiming with a strange mixture of ludicrous solemnity, and the fierce flashing of satiated vengeance, "Now, my dear Martha, I am free! have triumphed over these fiends, these insulting fiends, who stood grinning at me with looks of gaunt defiance, as if they were the personifications of famine, and daring me to worship my idol there while they were neglected. But I have cut them down at last,— and now for a glorious strife with Michael Angelo!" His infirmity did not assume the character of confirmed aberration of mind in the beginning; for he would talk rationally and temperately upon many subjects; and in moments of serene discourse with his wife, condemn (but ever more in mirth than in sorrow) the rash execution he had done upon the three unfortunate and unoffending pictures. Still he became more and more incapable of connecting in his thoughts the labours of his hand with the sustenance of his family. "Henceforth I will paint for immortality," he would say; "I will live no longer for the present, but for all time: and my delighted spirit shall glow with conscious rapture as it beholds the imperishable garland which posterity will weave for my name." The necessary consequence of this deplorable delusion was, that his domestic affairs became irretrievably embarrassed, and his family were reduced to privations whose bitterness and severity were felt by himself only in the momentary sense of their existence. His wife bore her share of these trying calamities with an enduring fortitude and patience, which her devoted love for her husband alone could have inspired, and which the hope, that never forsook her, of his restoration to reason, could alone have sustained. Whatever could be converted into money, was unhesitatingly devoted to that use; and when scarcely any thing remained but the more bulky furniture of the house, she exercised her ingenuity in various fanciful articles of needle-work, which she parted with for any price they would obtain. It need hardly be told how many hours of sedentary toil at an occupation 45 like this it required to produce a few shillings; nor how many heart-sickening disappointments, how many galling humiliations, were to be encountered before a purchaser could be found. Her close application, her mental anxiety, both on account of her husband and her children, added to poor and insufficient diet, reduced her to a state of such pitiable weakness, that she was at length unable to continue her labour. own. Then was her situation dreadful indeed! Famine at the door, and the hand that should drive it hence, powerless, alas! from a malady which showed no signs of abatement! She would have sought her husband's father in her extremity, and implored his aid—not for herself, if her participation in it would have turned it aside but for a son; and for that son's children, innocent of the crimes which had banished their father from the affections of his But she reverenced too deeply her husband's honour. She had heard him too often express what were his feelings at the conduct of his father; had heard him too often repeat his stern determination, rather to perish with hunger than owe the meal which saved him to one who had trampled upon his young heart's first ambition and its most cherished affections-these recollections were too vividly present to her mind, and she herself shared in all the feelings with which they were associated too entirely, to do that for her husband, in his benighted state, at which he himself would have spurned, and which would be unblessed by his sanction, when it should be Heaven's will to restore to him the light of reason. At length came the heaviest blow of all. A churlish creditor, one of those sordid reptiles of the earth, whose sole perception of what is right consists in knowing that he who has money owing to him has a right to be paid, no matter though he tears his debt from the convulsive grasp of an agonised father standing half-frenzied by theside of his famishing wife and children—a creature of this stamp, and the world swarms with such-put an execution into the house, and swept away by the ruthless hand of the law, (wrested to appease a demon not raised to distribute justice,) every remaining vestige of property. The savage scene had been acted only the day before it was my chance to pass the miserable wife as she sat for charity froni way-farers. To this last resource of the destitute she had resorted in utter despair. They could not pass another four-and-twenty hours as they had passed the preceding. They could not literally sit down and die for very want in their desolate habitation. A single shilling, (if the charity which walks the streets should bestow so much, and no more,) would at least suffice to satisfy the most importunate of the cravings of nature; and that must be done. There would then be time to think of what could be done. With the feeling of this necessity strong upon her, she quitted the house with her infant in her arms. Let me not forget to mention two circumstances. The one is, (as I had reason subsequently to know,) that the step of the door on which she sat, with her touching appeal-" Have pity on us, we are destitute!" belonged to the house in which her husband's father lived, and that he, in coming out that morning, had passed her. But they were mutually unacquainted with each other; while she was totally ignorant of the place where she had seated herself. Surely, were there such things in Nature as we sometimes read of -strange, mysterious, and occult sympathies, by which kindred bloods wonderfully respond to unknown ties-this man could not have been so near his own, under such circumstances, and have looked upon the mother and her child, only as he would have looked upon a common street mendicant! The other circumstance is this. When the sheriff's officers entered the house to levy the execution, her husband surveyed the process, not only with indifference, but with a sort of wild mirth, to see how the chairs, and tables, and beds were pulled about, and carried from room to room. His wife's dismay, his son's tears, moved him not. They were unheeded. He laughed, even, as they thrust him from the chair on which he was sitting, to remove it into the cart at the door. But, when two of the men were about to lay their hands on the picture by which he stood-on his Last Judgment at which he still worked every day, and which doubtless owed some of the extraordinary effect I have described to the very frenzy of his thoughts, he sprang upon them like a chafed leopard, threw them to the ground, and, in a frightful struggle, while he literally howled with rage, would have strangled them, had they not been powerful enough to escape from his grasp. Terrorstruck, they fled-he followed-and, snatching up a poker that lay in his way, when he had driven them into the street, he retreated to his room again, vociferating horrid maledictions against his antagonists, who were too prudent to renew their claims. It was this circumstance dwelling freshly upon his mind, which made him arm himself with his weapon when he came down to me; believing, as I afterwards learned, that I might be one of the officers returned to take away his picture. Nor was it till the admiration I expressed, roused his latent feelings of pride and joy, while it destroyed his suspicions, that he cast it away. I have little else to add. That picture is now in my possession. I became the purchaser of it at my own price-a price which did more than merely pay its value. It brought back comfort to a house of mourning. It placed the artist under such medical care |