'Muse, in this criticism I fear Thou really hast been too severe: Cosway paints miniatures with decent spirit, And Mrs. Cosway boasts some trifling merit.'

The furniture and fittings of Cosway's house in Stratford Place seem to have been of a most extravagant kind. He surrounded himself with suits of armour, Genoa velvet, mother-of-pearl, ebony and ivory, carving and gilding. His rooms were crowded with mosaic cabinets set with jasper, bloodstone, and lapis-lazuli, ormolu escritoires, buhl chiffoniers, Japanese screens, massive musical clocks, damask ottomans, with Persian carpets and Pompadour rugs on the floor, and costly tapestries on the walls; enamelled caskets set with onyxes, rubies, opals, and emeralds loaded the tables; the chimney-pieces, sculptured by Banks, were decked with bronzes, cut-glass, models in wax and terra-cotta, Nankin, Dresden, and Worcester china: altogether the place must have been quite a broker's paradise. Yet the painter was immensely proud of it; never seemed to weary of adding new curiosities to his overcrowded collection.

The failing health of his wife compelled him at last to tear himself away from his splendid and beloved upholstery. He carried the ailing lady to Flanders and to Paris. During the tour his conduct was of the most lordly kind. He possessed, and highly prized, certain cartoons attributed to Julio Romano, having refused a liberal offer for them from Russia, because, as he explained, 'he would not sell works of elegance to barbarians.' Impressed with the size and emptiness of the Louvre Gallery, however, he now offered his cartoons to the French King as a gift. They were accepted, and four splendid specimens of Gobelin tapestry were bestowed upon the painter in token of royal recognition and gratitude. These tapestries Cosway, objecting to retain them, possibly lest they should seem to represent a price paid for his cartoons, forthwith presented to the Prince of Wales. It was the humour of the grand little man to oblige royalty, the while he was moved by a keen regard for his own dignity. While at Paris he painted, by desire of the Duchess of Devonshire, portraits of the Duchess of Orleans and family, and the Duchess of Polignac; yet, when applied to for portraits of the King or Queen, he declined the commission, stating that he had come abroad for the sake of his wife's health and his own amusement, and not with professional objects in view.

For a season Mrs. Cosway seemed benefited by the change, and returned home; but a second attack of illness compelled her again to leave England, this time accompanied by her brother—a young artist whose skill in design had gained him the gold medal of the Royal Academy. Walpole writes to the Miss Berrys at Florence: 'I am glad Mrs. Cosway is with you.... but surely it is odd to drop her child and husband and country all in a breath!' The lady was absent three years, constantly expecting her husband to rejoin her; but he was prevented by various causes from quitting England. During her stay abroad her daughter died, an only child. It was some relief to the grieving mother to resume her art-labours, and she painted several large pictures for foreign churches. At Lyons she was persuaded by Cardinal Fesch to attempt the founding of a college for young ladies, but the war hindered her efforts, although she succeeded subsequently in carrying out a similar design at Lodi.

To their one child the parents were tenderly attached, although Walpole, while he admits Mrs. Cosway's affliction to be genuine, goes on to say rather cruelly,—'the man Cosway does not seem to think that much of the loss belonged to him.' According to Smith, however, he was dotingly fond of his little girl; was for ever painting her picture; and in one portrait of her asleep, he introduced the figure of a guardian angel rocking the cradle. The body of the child was embalmed and preserved in a marble sarcophagus which stood in the drawing-room in Stratford Place. It was not until the return of Mrs. Cosway to England that the interment took place in Bunhill Row Burial Ground.

Of Cosway and his wife, it is stated by the biographer of Mrs. Inchbald, who numbered them among her most intimate friends, that they were both 'mystics,' and 'could say almost as much of the unintelligible world as of this.' Hazlitt describes the painter as a Swedenborgian, a believer in animal magnetism—professing to possess the faculty of second sight, crediting whatever is incredible. Had he lived in these our days, he would probably have been a spiritualist, an electro-biologist, a table-turner. He was wont to proclaim his ability to converse with the dead or the distant, 'to talk with his lady at Mantua,' says Hazlitt, 'through some fine vehicle of sense, as we speak to a servant down-stairs through a conduit pipe.' Smith tells us that he had often heard Cosway relate quite seriously, and with an air of conviction that was unimpeachable, conversations he professed to have held with King Charles the First! Sometimes he would startle sober people by asserting that he had just come from interviews with Apelles and Praxiteles. Four years after Pitt's death, Cosway, at the dinner of the Royal Academy, professed to have been that morning visited by the deceased minister, who declared himself prodigiously hurt, that during his sojourn upon earth he had not given greater encouragement to the artist's talents. Another Academician, however, rather outdid this story. 'How can you talk such trash, Cosway?' he asked. 'You know all you have uttered to be lies; I can prove it. For this very morning, after Pitt had been with you he called upon me and said, "I know Cosway will mention my visit to him at your dinner to-day, but don't believe a word he says, for he'll tell you nothing but lies."' This unlooked-for counter-statement took Cosway by surprise, and left him without a reply.

Walpole once said of him, happily, that 'he romanced with his usual veracity.' Hazlitt thought a 'mystic' character was common to artists, instancing Loutherbourg, Sharp, Varley, Blake, and others, 'who seemed to relieve the literalness of their professional studies by voluntary excursions into the regions of the preternatural, to pass their time between sleeping and waking, and whose ideas were like a stormy night with the clouds driven rapidly across, and the blue sky and stars gleaming between.'

For Cosway's wonderful collection of articles of art, antiquarianism, and vertu, Hazlitt has only good-natured banter. Of what a strange jumble of apocryphal treasures the painter believed himself the possessor! And he was without the doubts and anxieties of ordinary collectors. They strive to believe and to cast aside all suspicion. But Cosway believed without the slightest effort; he was troubled by no hint of suspicion. His relics and curiosities were in his eyes absolutely and unquestionably genuine. His was the crucifix that Abelard prayed to; a lock of Eloisa's hair; the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckingham; the first finished sketch of the Jocunda; Titian's colossal outline of Peter Aretine; a mummy of an Egyptian king; a feather of a Phoenix; a piece of Noah's Ark, etc. 'Were the articles authentic?' asks Hazlitt; and he answers his own question—'What matter? Cosway's faith in them was true!'

Credit is due to the painter for his indomitable good spirits and buoyancy of heart. His later years were passed in much pain. He had been twice stricken with paralysis, and the use of his right hand had gone from him. Though removed from want, his old extravagant habits had considerably impaired his fortune. He had long left Stratford Place for a humbler, cheaper house in the Edgeware Road. And he had somewhat outlived his reputation. He had to endure severe criticism upon his artistic merits: much calling in question of his position as a painter. Still he was always bright and gay and kindly. He would hold up the crippled, wasted hand that had painted lords and ladies—the kings and queens of society—for some sixty years, and smile with unabated good humour at the vanity of human wishes. So Hazlitt relates: going on to say of him—'His soul appeared to possess the life of a bird; and such was the jauntiness of his air and manner, that to see him sit to have his half boots laced on, you would fancy (by the help of a figure) that instead of a little withered old gentleman, it was Venus attired by the Graces.' His nature was generous and frank. He gave liberally and cheerfully to almost everybody who applied to him for money. The number of letters he received requesting pecuniary assistance was stated to be almost incredible. Of borrowers who never repaid what they borrowed of him, and of patrons in default, of whom he was too proud to make repeated claims for what was strictly his due, a long catalogue might have been made.

He died suddenly at last of a third attack of paralysis, on the 4th day of July 1821. The seizure occurred as he was taking a carriage drive to Edgeware, and he expired without a groan in a few minutes. He had long been in doubt as to whether he should prefer to be buried in his native Devonshire or with his favourite Rubens at Antwerp. But struck with the orderly plan of a funeral in the vaults of a London Church, he had said, 'I prefer this to Antwerp or St. Paul's: bury me here.' He was interred accordingly at Marylebone New Church (the work of young Smirke, son of his brother academician), a select number of his professional and personal friends, and a long line of the carriages of his aristocratic patrons, following the funeral.

Mrs. Cosway erected, on the north wall, under the gallery of the church, a monument by Westmacott, to her husband's memory. The following indifferent epitaph by the painter's brother-in-law, 'Syntax' Coombe, was inscribed upon the marble:—

'Art weeps, Taste mourns, and Genius drops the tear O'er him so long they loved who slumbers here. While colours last, and Time allows to give The all-resembling grace, his name shall live.'

After the death of her husband Mrs. Cosway quitted England, and took up her abode at her Ladies' College at Lodi, where she was much loved and respected. How long she survived seems uncertain. Some accounts relate that she died the same year as Cosway. But Allan Cunningham, writing in 1833, described her as still living.



THE STORY OF A SCENE-PAINTER.

When, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Sir William Davenant, manager of the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, discarded the 'traverses' and tapestries which had theretofore been accepted as sufficient for the purposes of stage illusion, and substituted regular scenes 'painted in perspective,' without doubt there were to be found many conservative old playgoers who lifted up their voices against the startling innovation, and prophesied the approaching downfall of the drama. If the grandsons present marvelled how elder generations could for so long have gone without such useful and necessary appliances, assuredly the grandsires were complaining that now things had come to a pretty pass indeed, when a parcel of beardless, empty-pated boys, not content with stage fittings such as had been esteemed good and sufficient by the late Mr. William Shakespeare and his great brother-dramatists, demanded foolish paintings and idle garniture, that diverted attention from the efforts of the players and the purpose of the playwrights, and had never been dreamt of, and would never have been tolerated in the good, and simple, and palmy days gone by. Unquestionably, the first 'painting in perspective' brought upon the boards was, in the judgment of many,[16] the thin end of a wedge, which, as it thickened, was certain to drive forth and destroy all that was intellectually and vitally precious in the drama, and to lead the way to a last scene of all in the eventful history of the stage, which should be 'second childishness and mere oblivion.'

[16] 'I decidedly concur with Malone in the general conclusion that painted moveable scenery was unknown on our early stage; and it is a fortunate circumstance for the poetry of our old plays that it was so: the imagination of the auditor only was appealed to, and we owe to the absence of painted canvas many of the finest descriptive passages in Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and immediate followers. The introduction of scenery gives the date to the commencement of the decline of our dramatic poetry.'—Annals of the Stage, by J. Payne Collier, vol. iii. p. 366.

But the scene-painter having set foot within the theatre was not to be expelled. The intruder soon won for himself a large popularity; held his ground against criticism and opposition. He was no mere journeyman dauber. From the first he had taken distinct rank as an artist. Lustrous names adorn the muster-roll of scene-painters. Inigo Jones planned machinery and painted scenes for the masques, written by Ben Jonson, for performance before Anne of Denmark and the Court of James the First. Evelyn lauds the 'very glorious scenes and perspectives, the work of Mr. Streeter,' serjeant-painter to King Charles the Second. In February 1664, the Diarist saw Dryden's Indian Queen acted 'with rich scenes as the like had never been seen here, or haply, except rarely, elsewhere on a mercenary theatre.' Mr. Pepys—most devoted of playgoers—notes occasionally of particular plays, that 'the machines are fine and the paintings very pretty.' In October 1667, he records that he sat in the boxes for the first time in his life, and discovered that from that point of view 'the scenes do appear very fine indeed, and much better than in the pit,' to which part of the house he ordinarily resorted. The names of the artists who won Mr. Pepys' applause have not come down to us. But previously to 1679, one Robert Aggas, a painter of some fame, was producing scenes for the theatre in Dorset Gardens. Nicholas Thomas Dall, a Danish landscape-painter, settled in London in 1760, was engaged as scene-painter at Covent Garden Theatre, and was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1771. For the same theatre, John Richards, a Royal Academician, appointed secretary to the Academy in 1778, painted scenes for many years. Michael Angelo Rooker, pupil of Paul Sanby, and one of the first Associates of the Academy, was scene-painter at the Haymarket. Other names of note might be mentioned before the modern reputations of Roberts and Stanfield, Beverley and Callcott, Grieve and Telbin are approached; and especially over one intermediate name are we desirous of lingering a little. The story of the scene-painter of the last century, who was well known to his contemporaries as 'the ingenious Mr. DE LOUTHERBOURG,' presents incidents of singularity and interest that will probably be found to warrant our turning to it for purposes of inquest and comment.

The biographers of Philip James de Loutherbourg are curiously disagreed as to the precise period of his birth. Five different writers have assigned five different dates to that occurrence: 1728, 1730, 1734, 1740, and 1741; and it has been suggested, by way of explanation of this diversity, that the painter's fondness for astrological studies may have induced him to vary occasionally the date of his birth, in order that he might indulge in a plurality of horoscopes, and in such way better the chance of his predictions being justified by the actual issue of events. He was born, at Strasbourg, the son of a miniature painter, who died at Paris in 1768. Intended by his father for the army, while his mother desired that he should become a minister of the Lutheran Church, he was educated at the College of Strasbourg in languages and mathematics. Subsequently he chose his own profession, studying under Tischbein the elder, then under Vanloo and Francesco Casanova; the latter, a painter of battle pieces after the style of Bourgognone. By his landscapes exhibited at the Louvre, De Loutherbourg acquired fame in Paris, and in 1763 was elected a member of the French Academy of Painting, being then eight years below the prescribed age for admission to that distinction, say the biographers who date his birth from 1740. Quitting France, he travelled in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, and in 1771 came to England, moved hitherward probably by the opinion then prevalent both at home and abroad, that (as Edwards puts it in his Anecdotes of Painting) 'some natural causes prevented the English from becoming masters either in painting or sculpture.' Shortly after his arrival in England he was engaged by Garrick to design and paint scenes and decorations for Drury Lane Theatre, at a salary of L500; a sum considerably larger than had been thitherto paid to any artist for such services.

Of gorgeous scenery and gay dresses Garrick was as fond as any manager of our own day; he knew that these were never-failing allurements to the general public. Yet as a rule he confined his spectacle to the after-pieces; did not, after the modern fashion, illustrate and decorate what he regarded as the legitimate entertainments of the theatre. For new as for old plays, the stock scenery of the house generally sufficed, and some of the scenes employed were endowed with a remarkable longevity. Tate Wilkinson, writing in 1790, mentions a scene as then in use which he remembered so far back as the year 1747. 'It has wings and flat of Spanish figures at full length, and two folding doors in the middle. I never see those wings slide on but I feel as if seeing my old acquaintance unexpectedly.' Of the particular plays assisted by De Loutherbourg's brush, small account has come down to us. They were, no doubt, chiefly of a pantomimic and ephemeral kind. For the 'Christmas Tale,' produced at Drury Lane in 1773—the composition of which has been generally assigned to Garrick, though probably due to Charles Dibdin—De Loutherbourg certainly painted scenes, and the play enjoyed a considerable run, thanks rather to his merits than the author's. Some years later, in 1785, for the scenery of O'Keeffe's Omai, produced at Covent Garden Theatre, the painter furnished the designs, for which he was paid by the manager one thousand pounds, says Mr. J.T. Smith; one hundred pounds, says Mr. O'Keeffe; so stories differ! The scenery of Omai was appropriate to the then newly discovered islands in the South Pacific, and the play concluded with a kind of apotheosis of Captain Cook. In the course of Omai, Wewitzer, the actor who played a chief warrior of the Sandwich Islands, delivered a grand harangue in gibberish, which of course, for all the audience knew to the contrary, was the proper language of the natives; a sham English translation of the speech being printed with the book of the songs. The harangue was received with enormous applause!

As a scene-painter, De Loutherbourg was decidedly an innovator and reformer. He was the first to use set-scenes, and what are technically known as 'raking pieces.' Before his time the back scene was invariably one large 'flat' of strained canvas extending the whole breadth and height of the stage. He also invented transparent scenes, introducing representations of moonlight, sunshine, fire, volcanoes, etc., and effects of colour by means of silk screens of various hues, placed before the foot and side lights. He was the first to represent mists, by suspending gauzes between the scene and the audience. He made something of a mystery of the artifices he had recourse to, was careful to leave behind him at the theatre no paper or designs likely to reveal his plans, and declined to inform any one beforehand as to the nature of the illusions he desired to produce. He secretly held small cards in his hand which he now and then consulted to refresh his recollection, as his assistants carried out his instructions.

After Garrick had quitted the stage (in 1776) and sold his share in the management of Drury Lane to Sheridan and his partners, it was proposed to De Loutherbourg to continue in his office of chief scene-painter, his salary being reduced one half. This illiberal scale of remuneration the artist indignantly declined, and forthwith left the theatre. He is said, however, by Parke in his Musical Memoirs, to have painted the scenes for the successful burletta of The Camp, produced by Sheridan, at Drury Lane, in 1778.[17] But he now devoted himself more exclusively to the production of easel-pictures. He had, in 1773, become a contributor to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. In 1780 he was elected an Associate; in the following year he arrived at the full honours of academicianship. Peter Pindar, in his 'Lyrical Odes to the Royal Academicians for 1782,' finds a place for De Loutherbourg. Having denounced the unlikeness of Mason Chamberlin's portraits, he satirizes the style of art of the landscape painter:—

'And Loutherbourg, when Heaven so wills, To make brass skies and golden hills, With marble bullocks in glass pastures grazing: Thy reputation too will rise, And people gaping with surprise, Cry "Monsieur Loutherbourg is most amazing!"'

[17] Mr. Puff in the Critic, giving a specimen of 'the puff direct' in regard to a new play, says: 'As to the scenery, the miraculous powers of Mr. De Loutherbourg are universally acknowledged. In short, we are at a loss which to admire most, the unrivalled genius of the author, the great attention and liberality of the managers, the wonderful abilities of the painter, or the incredible exertions of all the performers.'

And in another ode he derides the artist's pictures as 'tea-boards,' 'varnished waiters,' and avows that his rocks are 'paste-board,' while his trees resemble 'brass wigs,' and his fleecy flocks 'mops.'

Probably the quiet of his studio oppressed our painter somewhat. The simple effects attainable in an easel-picture did not satisfy him. He missed the appliances of the stage: the coloured lights, the transparent scenes, the descending gauzes, and cleverly combined set-pieces. He would not go back to Drury Lane, however; as to that he was fully determined. He would not toil for ungrateful managers, or paint backgrounds merely to supplement and enrich the exertions of the actors. He decided upon providing London with a new entertainment; upon opening an exhibition that should be all scene painting.

Charles Dibdin, the famous sea song writer, who was also a dramatist, a composer of music, an actor, a scene painter, and a manager, had constructed in Exeter Change what he whimsically called 'The Patagonian Theatre:' in truth, a simple puppet-show, upon the plan of that contrived years before by Mr. Powell, under the Piazza, Covent Garden, and concerning which Steele had written humorously in the Spectator. Dibdin, assisted by one Hubert Stoppelaer, humorist and caricaturist, wrote miniature plays for the doll performers, recited their parts, composed the music, played the accompaniments upon a smooth-toned organ, and painted the scenes. The stage was about six feet wide and eight feet deep; the puppets some ten inches high; the little theatre was divided into pit, boxes, and gallery, and held altogether about two hundred persons. For half a century no exhibition of the kind had appeared in London. The puppet show was old enough to be a complete novelty to the audience of the day. For a time it thrived wonderfully; then managers and public seem both, by degrees, to have grown weary. Dibdin and his friend departed; the exhibition fell into the hands of incompetent persons; then closed its doors. The dolls, properties, scenery, and dresses were brought to the hammer by merciless creditors; and there was an end of the puppet-show. In 1782 De Loutherbourg took the theatre for the exhibition of his EIDOPHUSIKON.

De Loutherbourg had professedly two objects in view: to display his skill as a scene-painter well versed in dioramic effects, and to demonstrate to the English people the beauties of their own country. He averred 'that no English landscape-painter needed foreign travel to collect grand prototypes for his study.' The lakes of Cumberland, the rugged scenery of North Wales, and the mountainous grandeur of Scotland, furnished, he said, inexhaustible occupation for the pencil. He opposed the prejudice then rife among artists and amateurs alike, that England afforded no subjects for the higher display of the painter's art. He confined the Eidophusikon for the most part to the exhibition of English landscapes under different conditions of light and shadow.

A chief view exhibited was from the summit of One Tree Hill, Greenwich. There was cleverness evinced in the selection of this landscape. A large public are always prepared to be pleased when they are shown something with which they are well acquainted. Each spectator found himself, as it were, individually appealed to. Each had seen One Tree Hill, and could bring to bear upon the subject his own personal knowledge and observation, and so test and certify to the painter's skill. The view was a set-scene with a moveable sky at the back: a large canvas twenty times the surface of the stage, stretched on frames, and rising diagonally by means of a winding machine. De Loutherbourg excelled in his treatment of clouds; he secured in this way ample room and verge enough to display his knowledge and ingenuity. By regulating the action of his windlass he could control the movements of his clouds, allow them to rise slowly from the horizon and sail obliquely across the heavens, or drive them swiftly along, according to their supposed density and the power to be attributed to the wind. An arrangement of set-pieces cut in pasteboard represented the objects in the middle distance: the cupolas of Greenwich Hospital, the groups of trees in the park, the towns of Greenwich and Deptford, and the shipping in the Pool; due regard being had to size and colour, so that the laws of perspective in distance and atmosphere might not be outraged; the immediate foreground being constructed of cork broken into rugged and picturesque forms, and covered with minute mosses and lichens, 'producing,' says a critic of the period, 'a captivating effect amounting indeed to reality.'

In his method of illuminating his handiworks, De Loutherbourg was especially adroit. He abandoned the unnatural system (introduced by Garrick on his return from the Continent in 1765) of lighting the stage by means of a flaming line of footlights, and ranged his lamps above the proscenium, out of sight of the audience. Before his lamps he placed slips of stained glass—yellow, red, green, blue, and purple; and by shifting these, or happily combining them, was enabled to tint his scenes so as to represent various hours of the day and different actions of light. His 'Storm at Sea with the loss of the Halsewell, East-Indiaman,' was regarded as the height of artistic mechanism. The ship was a perfect model, correctly rigged, and carrying only such sail as the situation demanded. The lightning quivered through the transparent canvas of the sky. The waves, carved in soft wood from models made in clay, coloured with great skill and highly varnished to reflect the lightning, rose and fell with irregular action, flinging the foam now here, now there, diminishing in size and fading in colour as they receded from the spectator. Then we read—'De Loutherbourg's genius was as prolific in imitations of nature to astonish the ear as to charm the sight. He introduced a new art: the picturesque of sound.' That is to say, he simulated thunder by shaking one of the lower corners of a large thin sheet of copper suspended by a chain; the distant firing of signals of distress he imitated by striking, suddenly, a large tambourine with a sponge affixed to a whalebone spring—- the reverberations of the sponge producing a curious echo, as from cloud to cloud, dying away in the distance. The rushing sound of the waves was effected by turning round and round an octagonal pasteboard box, fitted with shelves, and containing small shells, peas, and shot; while two discs of strained silk, suddenly pressed together, emitted a hollow, whistling sound, in imitation of loud gusts of wind. Cylinders loosely charged with seed and small shot, lifted now at one end, now at the other, so as to allow the contents to fall in a pattering stream, represented the noise of hail and rain. The moon was formed by a circular aperture cut in a tin box containing a powerful Argand lamp, which was placed at the back of the scene, and brought near or carried far from the canvas as the luminary was supposed to be shining brightly or to be veiled by clouds. These contrivances, from a modern point of view, may strike the reader as constituting quite the A B C of theatrical illusion. But then it must be remembered that they were, for the most part, distinctly the inventions of De Loutherbourg, and, upon their first introduction, were calculated to impress the public of his day very remarkably.

For two seasons De Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon, exhibited at the Patagonian Theatre in Exeter Change, and afterwards at a house in Panton Square, was attended with singular success. Crowds flocked to the new entertainment; the artist world especially delighting in it. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was a frequent visitor, loudly extolled Mr. De. Loutherbourg's ingenuity; recommending him to the patronage of the most eminent men of the time, and counselling all art-students to attend the exhibition as a school of the wonderful effects of nature. Gainsborough's ready sympathies were completely enlisted. For a time, after his manner, he could talk of nothing else, think of nothing else; and he passed evening after evening at the exhibition. He even constructed a miniature Eidophusikon of his own—moved thereto by De Loutherbourg's success and the beauty of a collection of stained glass, the property of one Mr. Jarvis—and painted various landscapes upon glass and transparent surfaces, to be lighted by candles at the back, and viewed through a magnifying lens upon the peep-show principle. But at last the fickle public wearied of the Eidophusikon, as it had been wearied of Mr. Dibdin's puppets. The providers of amusement had, in those days, to be ever stirring in the production of novelties. The sight-seeing public was but a limited and exhaustible body then, little recruited by visitors from the provinces or travellers from the Continent. Long runs of plays or other entertainments—the rule with us—were then almost unknown. The Eidophusikon ceased to attract. The amount received at the doors was at last insufficient to defray the expenses of lighting the building. It became necessary to close the exhibition and provide a new entertainment. Soon the room in Exeter Change was crowded with visitors. Wild beasts were on view, and all London was gaping at them.

Meanwhile De Loutherbourg prospered as an artist. His reputation grew; his pictures were in request; he was honoured with the steady patronage of King George III., and was personally an acknowledged favourite at court: a thoroughly successful man indeed. Then we come down to the year 1789, and find the artist of the Eidophusikon assuming a new character. He has become a physician—a seer—a fanatic—and, it must be said, a quack; a disciple of Mesmer, a friend of Cagliostro; practising animal magnetism, professing to cure all diseases, and indulging in vaticination and second sight.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, credulity and imposition shook hands heartily and held a great festival. Throughout civilized Europe a sort of carnival of empiricism prevailed. Quack was king. A spurious leaven of charlatanism was traceable in politics, in science, in religion—pervaded all things indeed. The world was mad to cheat or to be cheated. The mountebank enjoyed his saturnalia. Never had he exhibited his exploits before an audience so numerous and so sympathetic—so eager to be swindled, so liberal in rewarding the swindler. Gravely does Miss Hannah More address Mr. Horace Walpole, concerning what she terms the 'demoniacal mummery'—'the operation of fraud upon folly' which then occupied the country. 'In vain do we boast of the enlightened eighteenth century, and conceitedly talk as if human reason had not a manacle left about her, but that philosophy had broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition; and yet, at this very time, Mesmer has got a hundred thousand pounds by animal magnetism in Paris, and Mainaduc is getting as much in London. There is a fortune-teller in Westminster who is making little less. Lavater's physiognomy books sell at fifteen guineas a set. The diving [divining?] rod is still considered as oracular in many places. Devils are cast out by seven ministers; and, to complete the disgraceful catalogue, slavery is vindicated in print and defended in the House of Peers! Poor human nature, when wilt thou come to years of discretion?' Mr. Walpole writes back (he has always a proper tone for Miss More, reserving his levity and license for less staid correspondents):—'Alas! while Folly has a shilling left, there will be enthusiasts and quack doctors;' and he adds, airing his pet affectation—a hatred of royalty, a love for republicanism—'and there will be slaves while there are kings or sugar-planters.'

Joseph Balsamo—more generally known by his pseudonym of Count Alexander De Cagliostro, expelled from France, after nine months' durance in the Bastille, on account of his complicity in the diamond necklace fraud and scandal—had taken refuge in England, bringing with him a long list of quackeries and impostures; among them, his art of making old women young again; his system of 'Egyptian freemasonry,' as he termed it, by virtue of which the ghosts of the departed could be beheld by their surviving friends; and the secrets and discoveries of the great Dr. Mesmer in the so-called science of animal magnetism. Walpole at once proclaims the man a rascal, and proposes to have him locked up for his mummeries and impositions. Miss More laments that people will talk of nothing else. 'Cagliostro and the cardinal's necklace,' she writes, 'spoil all conversation, and destroyed a very good evening at Mr. Pepys's last night' A discussion of such subjects was by no means compatible with Miss More's notion of a good evening.

What could have induced simple-minded Mr. De Loutherbourg to put trust in this arch-juggler? Can it have been that from the painter's native Strasbourg had come to him unimpeachable accounts of Cagliostro's feats during his stay there, which had preceded his nefarious expedition to Paris? But the artist is ever excitable, receptive, impressible—the ready prey of the dealer in illusion and trickery. De Loutherbourg is soon at the feet of the quack Gamaliel; soon he is proclaiming himself an inspired physician, practising mesmerism. Cosway and his wife declared themselves clairvoyants. Other painters of the period were dreaming dreams and seeing visions. Nor was it only the artist world that took up with, and made much of, Count Cagliostro and his strange doings. Wiser people than Mr. De Loutherbourg were led astray by the mountebank, though they did not wander so far from the paths of reason and right, nor publish so glaringly the fact of their betrayal into error. Cagliostro was the rage of the hour. The disciples of Dr. Mesmer were without number. It was in ridicule of general rather than class credulity that Mrs. Inchbald wrote (or adapted) her comedy of Animal Magnetism, produced on the stage of Covent Garden in 1788.

A curious fanatical pamphlet, by one Mary Pratt, of Portland Street, Marylebone, was published in 1789. It was entitled, A List of Curses performed by Mr. and Mrs. de Loutherbourg, of Hammersmith Terrace, without Medicine: By a Lover of the Lamb of God, and was dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury in very high-flown terms. Mr. De Loutherbourg was described as 'a gentleman of superior abilities, well known in the scientific and polite assemblies for his brilliancy of talents as a philosopher and painter,' who, with his wife, had been made proper recipients of the 'divine manuductions,' and gifted with power 'to diffuse healing to the afflicted; whether deaf, dumb, lame, halt, or blind.' The Archbishop was therefore entreated to compose a form of prayer to be used in all churches and chapels, that nothing might prevent the inestimable power of the De Loutherbourgs from having its free course, and to order public thanksgiving to be offered up for the same. In her preface, Mrs. Pratt stated that her pamphlet had been published without the consent of Mr. De Loutherbourg, and that he had reprimanded her on account of it, and enjoined her positively to suppress it; but that on mature reflection she had considered it more advisable to offend an individual rather than permit thousands of her fellow-creatures to remain strangers to the precious gifts of the painter. 'I judged by my own private feelings,' she writes, 'that had I any relative either deaf, dumb, blind, or lame, how thankful I should be to find a cure (more especially gratis); therefore I suffered the pamphlet to be sold, in hopes that by circulating these most solemn truths, many poor afflicted people might come and be healed.'

The cures enumerated in Mrs. Pratt's list would be marvellous enough if the slightest credit could be attached to the lady's wild statements. De Loutherbourg's treatment of the patients who flocked to him was undoubtedly founded on the practice of Mesmer, though Horace Walpole appears to draw a distinction between the curative methods of the two doctors, when he writes to the Countess of Ossory in July 1789: 'Loutherbourg the painter is turned an inspired physician, and has three thousand patients. His sovereign panacea is barley water. I believe it is as efficacious as mesmerism. Baron Swedenborg's disciples multiply also. I am glad of it. The more religions and the more follies the better: they inveigle proselytes from one another.' In a subsequent letter he writes, in reference to a new religion advocated by Taylor the Platonist:—'He will have no success. Not because nonsense is not suited to making proselytes—witness the Methodists, Moravians, Baron Swedenborg, and Loutherbourg the painter—but it should not be learned nonsense, which only the literate think they understand after long study. Absurdity announced only to the ear and easily retained by the memory has other guess operation. Not that I have any objection to Mr. Taylor for making proselytes: the more religions the better. If we had but two in the island they would cut one another's throats for power. When there is plenty of beliefs the professors only gain customers here and there from rival shops, and make more controversies than converts.' This letter was also written to the Countess of Ossory. It was hardly in so free a vein on such a subject that the writer would have ventured to address Miss Hannah More; with whom Mr. Walpole was fond of corresponding about this period.

In Mrs. Pratt's List we read of a lad named Thomas Robinson, suffering from the king's evil, and dismissed from St. Bartholomew's Hospital as incurable, brought before Mr. De Loutherbourg, who 'administered to him yesterday in the public healing-room, amidst a large concourse, among whom were some of the first families of distinction in the kingdom,' and wholly cured the sufferer. The two daughters born deaf and dumb of Mrs. Hook, Stable Yard, St. James's, waited upon Mrs. De Loutherbourg, 'who looked upon them with an eye of benignity and healed them.' 'I heard them both speak,' avers Mrs. Pratt, by way of settling the matter. Among other cures we find 'a man with a withered arm which was useless, cured in a few minutes by Mr. De Loutherbourg in the public healing-room at Hammersmith;' 'Mr. Williams, of Cranbourne Street, ill of a fever, had kept his bed ten weeks, was cured instantly;' 'a gentleman, confined with gout in his stomach, kept his bed, was cured instantly;' 'a green-grocer in Weymouth Street, Marylebone, next door to the Weavers' Arms, cured of lameness in both legs—went with crutches—is perfectly well;' 'a Miss W——, a public vocal performer, cured,—but had not goodness of heart enough to own the cure publicly;' 'a child cured of blindness, at Mr. Marsden's, cheesemonger, in the borough.' Other cases are set forth; but the reader will probably consider that specimens enough have been culled from Mrs. Pratt's pamphlet.

That the proceedings of the De Loutherbourgs attracted extraordinary attention is very certain. Crowds surrounded the painter's house at Hammersmith, so that it was with difficulty he could go in or out. Particular days were set apart and advertised in the newspapers as 'healing days,' and a portion of the house was given up as a 'healing-room.' Patients were admitted to the presence of the artist-physician by tickets only, and to obtain possession of these, it is said that three thousand people were to be seen waiting at one time. Mrs. Pratt recounts 'with horror and detestation 'the wickedness of certain speculators in the crowd, who, having procured tickets gratis, unscrupulously sold them, at a profit ranging from two to five guineas, to buyers who were tired of waiting. De Loutherbourg complained bitterly that out of the thousands he professed to have cured, but few returned to thank him for the great benefits he had conferred upon them. He preferred to believe in the ingratitude of his patients rather than adopt the more obvious and reasonable course of questioning the perfect virtue of his curative powers, Mrs. Pratt, in concluding her pamphlet, entreats the magistracy or governors of the police to wait on Mr. De Loutherbourg and consult with him as to a proper mode of promoting his labours, and suggests that a 'Bethesda' should be forthwith built for the reception of the sick, and that officers should be appointed to preserve decorum, and to facilitate the efforts of Mr. and Mrs. De Loutherbourg, 'without so much crowding.' Finally she exhorts the world at large to contribute generously to the promotion of these beneficial objects.

But even at the date of Mrs. Pratt's pamphlet the tide was turning—had turned. The nine days' wonder was over. The mania was dying of exhaustion. Incidentally, the lady relates that 'having suffered all the indignities and contumely that man could suffer,' the inspired physician had for a time retired from practice into the country. 'I have heard,' she continues, 'people curse him and threaten his life, instead of returning him thanks.' In truth, as the public credulity waned, the doctor's cures failed. His labours were of no avail; his prophecies were falsified. His patients rose against him; the duped grew desperate; the mob became exceeding wroth. The house in Hammersmith Terrace was attacked; stones were thrown, and windows smashed. Not much further mischief was done, however. De Loutherbourg and his wife prudently withdrew from public observation—quitted the kingdom. They were next heard of in company with their friend Count Cagliostro in Switzerland; Madame Cagliostro having accompanied them in their journey from England. But Count Cagliostro's career of jugglery and fraud was nearly over. On the night of the 27th December 1789, he was arrested in Rome, and shut up in the Castle of St. Angelo, whence he never emerged alive.

In the curious and scarce Life and Adventures of Joseph Balsamo, commonly called Count Cagliostro, translated from the Italian, and published in London in 1791, copies are given of certain strange papers found in his possession, concerning which he was examined by the Inquisition during his imprisonment. In one of these documents there is unquestionable reference to De Loutherbourg, though the painter's name is not given at length, and appears surrounded by the jargon of Cagliostro's so-called system of Egyptian freemasonry, of which it is not possible to render any satisfactory interpretation. We extract from the paper the following:—

'On the twentieth day of the eighth month—

'The Grand Master being employed in his operations, after the usual ceremonies, the Pupil, before seeing the angel, said, "I find myself in a dark room.

'"I see a golden sword suspended over my head.

'"I perceive Louth—g arrive.

'"He opens his breast and shows a wound in his heart; he holds out a poniard to me."

'Grand Master. "Is he employed in the service of the Grand Cophte?"

'Pupil. "Yes."

'G. M. "What else do you see?"

'P. "I see a star.

'"I see two.

'"I see seven."

'G. M. "Proceed."

'P. "Louth—g has retired—the scene changes, I see seven angels," etc. etc.

Cagliostro was ordered by the Inquisition to explain the meaning of this paper. He professed the profoundest ignorance as to its purport. There will probably be no great harm in concluding, therefore, that it did not possess meaning of any kind. But the reader is left to form his own opinion on the subject.

Soon De Loutherbourg was found to be again in England. But he practised no more as an inspired physician; he now followed sedulously his legitimate profession. His eccentricities and escapades were overlooked; it seems to have been agreed that he had been more fool than knave—that he had imposed upon himself quite as much as upon other people.

A highly esteemed painter, he was permitted to resume his place in society. In proof of the regard in which he was held, it may be noted that the guardians of the De Quinceys deemed it worth while to pay De Loutherbourg a premium of one thousand guineas, to receive as a pupil William, the elder brother of Thomas De Quincey, who had given promise of skill in drawing. The young fellow died, however, in his sixteenth year, about 1795, in the painter's house at Hammersmith. A more moderate sum had some years previously been demanded of Mr. Charles Bannister, the actor, for the art-education of his son John. For a payment of fifty pounds per annum for four years, it was agreed that John Bannister should be taught, boarded, and lodged. But the arrangement came to nothing. De Loutherbourg demanded the payment of the money in advance. He mistrusted the players. They had caricatured him on the stage as 'Mr. Lanternbug,' in General Bourgoyne's comedy, The Maid of the Oaks; and then his mocking artist brethren caught at the nickname, corrupting it, however, to 'Leatherbag.' Mr. Bannister was unable or unwilling to comply with the painter's requirements: so young John was sent to the school of the Royal Academy, which he soon deserted, and finally trod the boards, and charmed the town as an actor. Another pupil of De Loutherbourg, and a close imitator of his worst manner, who is yet worthy of public notice as the founder of the Dulwich Gallery, was Francis Bourgeois, knighted by the King of Poland. Edward Dayes, artist, critic, and biographer of artists, is said to have exclaimed eccentrically in reference to Sir Francis: 'Dietricy begat Casanova, Casanova begat De Loutherbourg, De Loutherbourg begat Franky Bourgeois, a dirty dog, who quarrelled with nature, and bedaubed her works!'

By his pictures of 'Lord Howe's Victory on the 1st of June 1794,' and 'The Storming of Valenciennes,' De Loutherbourg acquired great popularity.[18] For Macklin's Bible (most luxurious of editions, in seven folio volumes, published in seventy parts at one guinea each!) he painted 'The Angel destroying the Assyrian Host,' and 'The Deluge;' the latter a particularly spirited and effective performance. Dayes, his contemporary, suggests, however, that he was made a historical painter by the printsellers, rather than by the sufficiency of his own genius in that respect. For the higher purposes of art, his composition was too defective, his drawing not masterly enough, and his execution too small and delicate. But Dayes greatly admired De Loutherbourg's 'Review of Warley Camp,' in the Royal Collection; especially praising the animals introduced, and the cool grey of the general effect; the painter as a rule being prone to a somewhat coppery tone of colour.

[18] 'July 25th, 1798. Went with Geiseveiller to see the picture of the "Siege of Valenciennes" by Loutherbourg. He went to the scene of action accompanied by Gilray, a Scotchman, famous among the lovers of caricature; a man of talents, however, and uncommonly apt at sketching a hasty likeness. One of the merits of the picture is the portraits it contains, English and Austrian. The Duke of York is the principal figure as the supposed conqueror; and the Austrian general, who actually directed the siege, is placed in a group, where, far from attracting attention, he is but just seen. The picture has great merit; the difference of costume, English and Austrian, Hulan, etc., is picturesque. The horse drawing a cart in the foreground has that faulty affected energy of the French school, which too often disgraces the works of Loutherbourg. Another picture by the same artist, as a companion to this, is the victory of Lord Howe on the first of June; both were painted at the expense of Mechel, printseller at Basle, and of V. and R. Green, purposely for prints to be engraved from them. For the pictures they paid L500 each, besides the expenses of Gilray's journeys to Valenciennes, Portsmouth, etc'—Diary of THOMAS HOLCROFT.

In 1808, Turner, appointed Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy, went to live at Hammersmith, in order, it has been suggested, to be near De Loutherbourg, of whose works he was known to be an admirer. That he should have aided in the art-training and forming of the greatest of landscape painters is a real tribute to the merits of De Loutherbourg. It is something to have been even the fuel that helped the fire of a great genius to burn the more brightly.

The characteristics of the old scene-painter's art which attracted the attention of Turner, were doubtless the boldness and strength of his effects: his rolling clouds and tossing waters; his sudden juxta-positions of light and shade; his bright and transparent, if occasionally impure and unnatural, system of colour. He was of another and inferior school to Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, and Constable, who, differing widely in their points of view and in their methods of art, are yet linked together by a common love of the natural aspects of the objects they studied, and a preference for a tender and temperate over what may be called a hectic and passionate rendering of landscape. But succeeding or failing, De Loutherbourg certainly aimed at the reproduction of certain pictorial tours de force which they would never have attempted. He was an innovator in the studio as on the stage. According to modern modes of thought he was not, of course, a conscientious worker. His landscapes were indeed begun, continued, and completed in his painting-room. A few crude pencil lines upon a card were enough for him to take home with him; for the rest he relied upon his memory or his invention. But in such wise was the general method of his time. Painters produced their representations of land and sea after close toil by their firesides. There was not much taking of canvases into the open air in the days of De Loutherbourg. Pursuing such a system, he became, necessarily, very mannered; and yet, with other and greater men, he helped to destroy a conventional manner in art. Rules had been laid down restricting the artist to an extent that threatened to oust nature altogether from painting. It had been decreed, for instance, that in every landscape should appear a first, second, and third light, and, at least, one brown tree. Departure from such a principle was, according to Sir George Beaumont and others, flat heresy. De Loutherbourg avowed himself a heretic. And he ventured to object to the old-established, well-known classically-composed landscape, which was becoming an art nuisance. The thing has disappeared now, but the reader has probably a dim acquaintance with the classically-composed landscape. It was somewhat in this wise: in no particular country, a temple of ruins on the right hand was balanced by a trio of towering firs on the left. In the middle distance was raised another temple in a more tenantable state of repair, above a river crossed by a broken bridge, the ragged arches strongly reflected in the water; at the back, in the centre of the horizontal line (gracefully waved with lilac mountains), was the sun, rising or setting, it was never quite certain which; whilst little ill-drawn, inch-high figures straggled about in the foreground, and furnished a name to the picture: AEneas and Dido, Venus and Adonis, Cephalus and Aurora, Apollo and Daphne, etc. etc. De Loutherbourg's dashing sea-views and stormy landscapes, although they might savour a little of the lamp and the theatre, did service in hindering the further production of the 'classical compositions' of the last century.

De Loutherbourg died on the 11th March, 1812, at the house in Hammersmith Terrace, which had been the scene of his exploits as an inspired physician. He was buried in Chiswick churchyard, near the grave of William Hogarth.



THE STORY OF AN ENGRAVER.

The father of John Keyse Sherwin was a hard-working man, living humbly enough at Eastdean, Sussex, earning his subsistence by cutting and shaping wooden bolts for shipbuilders. Up to his seventeenth year the son, born in 1751, helped the father in his labours. A fine, sturdy, well-grown lad, with abundant self-confidence, young Sherwin seems to have acquired, now one knows exactly how, an inclination for art. Shown one day, at the house of a rich employer, a miniature painting of some value, the youth stoutly asserts his conviction that, if provided with proper materials, he can produce a fair imitation of the work before him. Drawing-paper is given him, and a pencil is thrust into a hand that has grown so hard and horny with constant hewing of wood that it scarcely possesses sensitiveness sufficient to grasp and ply the slim little art-implement. The young fellow perseveres, however, and finally produces a tolerable copy of the picture.

Much surprise and interest are excited by this achievement of the woodcutter's son. In Sherwin's days 'the patron' was a part which rich people were rather fond of playing. The fact of having discovered a new artist was in itself a sort of certificate of the discoverer's acumen and taste. If the patronized succeeded, the patron forthwith took high rank as a connoisseur; while on the other hand, if the efforts of the protege resulted in failure, no great harm accrued to any one; a little money was spent to no purpose: that was all. The mania for patronizing was harmless enough; if based upon some vain glory, there was still a fair leaven of kindliness about it. In the present case, the patron had lighted upon a really clever fellow. Young Sherwin was well worth all the money and pains spent upon him by his first employer and friend, Mr. William Mitford, of the Treasury; and but for some inherent flaw in his moral constitution, would have done his patron and himself unquestionable credit.

The young man was taken from wooden bolt-making, sent up to London, and placed under Bartolozzi, an accomplished and very thriving designer and engraver, who formed one of the original members of the Royal Academy on its institution in 1768. Bartolozzi found his pupil apt. He made, indeed, rapid progress, and about 1772 received the Academy gold medals for drawings of 'Coriolanus taking leave of his family,' and 'Venus soliciting Vulcan to make armour for her son.' From 1774 to 1780 his name is to be found in the catalogues of the Academy as an exhibitor of various drawings, original and copied, in red and black chalks, after the manner his master had rendered popular. Sherwin had proved himself a vigorous, dashing draughtsman, standing high in his preceptor's good opinion, higher still in his own, and surely gaining the applause of the town.

Quitting Bartolozzi, he set up for himself, taking an expensive house in St. James's Street. He there commenced a desultory system of designing, painting, and engraving; doing less engraving than anything else, however. It was his most legitimate occupation, but it was laborious, took time, was not very highly remunerated, and he wanted to make money—as much and as quickly as possible. He had patrons in plenty, eager for his graceful, facile drawings, prepared to pay good prices for them; and the man himself became a favourite in society. He was handsome, ready, good-natured; well pleased to array his shapely person in smart raiment, disport himself in the drawing-rooms of the noble and rich, and add his name to the unprofitable list of fashion's votaries.

He had fallen upon 'dressy' times. A handsome young Prince of Wales was preaching, by example, that costliness of attire was indispensable among gentlemen; and the woodcutter's son set up decidedly for being a gentleman. A record of his costume on one occasion, when he was engaged to dine at his friend Sir Brook Boothby's, has come down to us. A superfine scarlet lapelled coat, with gilt dollar-sized buttons; a profuse lace frill frothing over the top of his white satin, jasmin-sprigged waistcoat; small-clothes of the glossiest black satin, with Bristol diamond buckles; silk stockings, tinged with Scott's liquid-dye blue, and decorated with Devonshire clocks; long ruffles, falling over hands once so worn with rude labour; extravagant buckles covering his instep; and his hair piled up high in front, with three rows of side curls, pomatumed and powdered, and tied into a massive club at the back of his head. Be sure that Mr. Sherwin, thus adorned, presented an imposing aspect; while his morning dress was scarcely less striking. Scarlet and nankeen were the colours chiefly favoured for the spring costume of the exquisites of the period. To the taste of a man of fashion, Mr. Sherwin added an artist's discrimination. He was very difficult to please in regard to shades of colour. It is told of him that he had four scarlet coats made for him before his delicate perception in this respect could be altogether satisfied. He would have the right tone of scarlet, or none at all. 'Fortunately,' observes a critic personally acquainted with the fastidious gentleman, 'he had as many brothers as rejected coats.' And Sherwin was really kind-hearted and generous. There seems to have been no false pride about him. With all his success and prosperity, his airs of fashion and pretentiousness, he was not ashamed of his less fortunate relatives—his wood-cutting father and brothers. He befriended them as long as he was able; tried to lift them up to his own position; brought them up to town, and did what he could to make fine gentlemen of them. His efforts were not attended with much success, however. Possibly the world of fashion found that one member of the Sherwin family was quite as much as it wanted. Besides, by reason of his abilities, the artist had a right to notice and distinction; his relatives were without any such title. They were simple labouring people, much amazed at the luxury and splendour with which they found their kinsman surrounded. A story is told of their dining with the successful artist; when one of the younger lads, without waiting or asking for a spoon, thrusts his fingers into a dish of potatoes to help himself. The father of the family, however, was quick to perceive his son's offence against good manners, and corrected him in a loud whisper: 'Moosn't grabble yer han' 'moong the 'tators here!'

At this time Sherwin was making about twelve hundred pounds a year. With industry he might have doubled that sum. But he was incorrigibly idle; was without rule or system. For one day that he worked he would waste three in sauntering about, calling on his friends, and in all sorts of frivolous pursuits. And then the dissipations of the evening were as so many heavy mortgages upon the labour of the morning. His expenditure was profuse. He gave away money liberally in charity; was especially fond of relieving the distressed widows and orphans of clergymen, observing that the children of a poor curate were more to be pitied than those of a London artist—since the latter generally had some qualification by which they could gain a livelihood. All this had been well enough if Mr. Sherwin had been a man of independent fortune, or had even pursued prudently his own profession. But, his plan of life considered, he had, in truth, no money to give away. His charity was only another form of prodigality, He was a gambler, too. Such money as he gained when he would condescend to work was quickly swept from him at the hazard-table. He was soon deeply in debt; his creditors growing more and more impatient and angry every day.

As an artist, his rapidity and cleverness were remarkable. The late Mr. J.T. Smith, who was for some years keeper of the prints in the British Museum, was in early life a pupil of Sherwin's, and bore testimony to the singular ability of his master. He was ambidexterous. Occupied upon a large engraving, he would often commence a line with his right hand, then, tossing the graver into his left, would meet and finish the line at the other end of the plate with marvellous accuracy. He had great knowledge of the human form, and would sometimes begin a figure at the toe, draw upwards, and complete it at the top of the head in a curiously adroit manner. If he had but worked! Commissions poured in upon him, yet he left them unexecuted. He undertook contracts, yet could seldom be persuaded to execute them. Sometimes when the fit seized him, or when his need of ready money was very urgent, he would apply himself with extraordinary energy, commencing a plate one day, sitting up all night, and producing it finished at breakfast-time the next morning. But this industry was only occasional and accidental. Speedily he relapsed again into slothfulness and self-indulgence.

People of note and fashion at one time thronged Mr. Sherwin's studio. It was his boast, that from five to five-and-twenty of the most beautiful women in London were to be seen every spring morning at his house. For one day he hit upon a notable device, which would probably have made his fortune if he had but given the thing fair play. He had made a drawing of the finding of Moses. No ordinary illustration of a scene from Biblical history, however. Mr. Sherwin did not depend upon merely the intrinsic merits of his design; for Pharaoh's daughter was a portrait of the Princess-Royal of England, and grouped round her were all the most distinguished ladies of the English court—the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duchess of Rutland, Lady Duncannon, Lady Jersey, Mrs. Townley Ward, and others—some fifteen in all. Even tiny Moses was said to be a portrait of some baby of distinction, born conveniently at the time. The picture was a great success. Popular taste had been cunningly measured and fitted. This ingenious interleaving of the Bible and the Peerage found a host of admirers. There were some malcontents, of course: ladies whose claims to be ranked among court beauties had been summarily passed over by the painter; for he has rather an invidious task before him who undertakes to decide who are the fifteen most beautiful of English women of quality. He is certain to make hundreds of enemies if he makes fifteen friends; and he cannot rely for certain upon doing even that much, for, as happened in the present instance, jealousies may spring up among the chosen fifteen. Mr. Sherwin was charged by certain of the ladies portrayed in the picture with partiality and favouritism. One beauty had been shown too prominently in the design, greatly to the prejudice of other beauties, who were unfairly restricted to the background. And why should one lady be displayed so advantageously—in a light so brilliant—while other ladies not less attractive, as they opined, were exhibited in so strangely subdued a way, with ugly shadows marring the lustre of their loveliness? And then why, was indignantly asked, why had the artist arranged the portraits so cruelly? Why was this charming fair one, whose graces were of an irregular pattern—whose nose has a heavenward inclination—who pretends to no strictness of beauty, according to absurd rules laid down in drawing-books—why is she brought into such fatal juxtaposition with this other severe and classical-looking and statuesque lady! To be merely a foil? Much obliged, Mr. Sherwin! The offended belle expressing angry and ironic gratitude sweeps from the painter's studio, gathering her rustling skirts together that they may not be soiled by the least contact with the canvases and plaster casts, and other art-paraphernalia and rubbish about the place.

The picture was without real artistic value, though undoubtedly pretty and graceful. It was a mere acted charade of the 'Finding of Moses,' got up impromptu as it were; the ladies being in ball-room attire, with high powdered heads, strung with pearls and surmounted with feathers; their silken dresses trimmed with laces, and frills, and furbelows; their faces well whitened and rouged, according to the mode of the day. It was more like a plate from a fashion-book than a scene from Scripture history. True, some small attempt at imparting 'local colour' and air of truth to the thing was just discernible. There was an affectation of Orientalism about the background—a line of palm-trees and plenty of pyramids and temples, presumed to be Egyptian, their style of architecture being nondescript otherwise; but these only made the foreground figures appear more utterly preposterous. Still, the picture pleased the town. It was something to see in one group portraits of the prettiest women in the country. There was a great demand for copies of the engraving. And yet it was with difficulty the harebrained artist could be induced to complete the plate, and supply his patrons and subscribers with prints in return for their guineas. The thriftless, flighty fellow seemed to persist in misconceiving his situation, undervaluing his artist abilities; forgetting that but for these he would still have been peg-cutting in the Sussex woods. He would regard himself as a gentleman of independent property, with whom art was simply a pastime—not at all an indispensable means of winning his sustenance. He seemed, indeed, to treat his talent as a sort of obstacle in his path, blamed the world for having made him an artist, and was fond of asserting that, for his own part, he should have preferred the army as a profession!

He was a sort of Twelfth-Night King of Art. For a brief span his success seemed to be without limits. His house was daily besieged by beaux and belles of quality. 'Horses and grooms,' says Miss Hawkins in her Memoirs, 'were cooling before the door; carriages stopped the passage of the street; and the narrow staircase ill sufficed for the number that waited the cautious descent or the laborious ascent of others.' But, of course, this state of things did not last very long. Mr. Sherwin, by his indolence—and indolence in his situation was a sort of insolence—soon put himself out of fashion. Fortune showered her gifts at his feet, but he was too superb a gentleman to stoop and pick them up; so the goddess, wearying of conferring favours that were so ill-appreciated, turned away from him in quest of more reverential votaries. When the footmen of the quality had done with playing fantasias upon his doorknocker, the duns took their turn, and brought less pleasant music out of it.

A troublesome time had the fashionable artist. He had to give all his attention now to the question how his creditors could be evaded. For he preferred evasion to payment. It never seems to have occurred to him that the last was as efficacious a mode of silencing a dun's complaint as keeping out of his way; while it was infinitely preferable to the creditor. But either he had not the money by him at the right moment, or he wanted it for some other purpose—to spend in punch, probably—for he was now devoting himself steadily to the consumption of that deleterious compound. He had become too idle now to work for more than the necessities of the moment—to supply himself with pocket-money sufficient for his immediate requirements. His argument was, that if he could only postpone payment, he was quite justified in postponing work. The main thing was to avoid, put off, and distance his duns. Curious stories are told of his efforts and exploits in this respect. An old engraver, one Roberts, purblind from incessant poring over copper-plates, after repeated calls, finds at last his mercurial debtor at home, and demands the settlement of his little bill for work done. Sherwin is very civil and obliging, promises to settle forthwith the account against him; then, taking base advantage of his creditor's defective vision, he makes good his escape, leaving Roberts confronting the lay-figure of the studio decked for the occasion with its proprietor's coat and wig. Imagine the indignation of the creditor upon the discovery of the imposture! Upon another occasion the artist, splendidly attired—for he is engaged to dine at Sir Brook Boothby's—is prisoned in his room, prevented from stirring forth by the fact that a German tailor, a determined creditor who will take no denial, who will listen to no more excuses, has sat down at the chamber door, to starve the debtor into surrender. Time passes; there is no exit from the house but through the studio, and there is posted the inexorable dun, who has already waited five hours, who will wait five more—fifty more, if need be—but he will see his debtor. And Mr. Sherwin has no money. What is he to do?

Presently the siege is raised. Good-natured Lord Fitzwilliam enters, appreciates the situation, produces his pocket-book, and satisfies the tailor's demand. 'Here, Mr. Sherwin,' says his lordship to the relieved and grateful engraver, 'here is a present for you. Your tailor's receipt for making a fine gentleman!' And Mr. Sherwin is free at last to go to his dinner-party with what appetite he may.

We have another glimpse of the artist—mad with drink, and up all night, alarming the neighbourhood by firing off pistols out of the window to testify his devotion to his patrons of the house of Cavendish, his joy that an heir had been born to the titles and honours of the dukedom of Devonshire—and then he falls, disappears. Invitations no longer come from Sir Brook Boothby and other grand friends; or, if they come, they don't find Mr. Sherwin at home. As long as he can he keeps his creditors at bay; then takes to flight—hides to escape arrest. He binds himself to work for a publisher who harbours and supports him. But it is too late; he cannot work now if he would. He is greatly changed, his constitution has yielded at last to his repeated and reckless attacks upon it. His sight is dim, and his hand is palsied. He has yielded all claim to be accounted an 'exquisite;' the fashions are nothing to him now; he is simply a broken-down, worn-out, prematurely old man. His courage has left him, his gay air of confidence has quite gone; he cannot look his misfortunes in the face; he shrinks from, shivers at, and, in his weakness and despair, exaggerates them wildly; they prey upon him, go near to driving him mad. Pursued and tracked to his publisher's house—or is it merely his fears that mislead him?—he quits his place of refuge, breaks cover, and flies he hardly knows whither. George Steevens, the editor of Shakespeare, wrote on the first October 1790 to a correspondent at Cambridge: 'I am assured that Sherwin the engraver died in extreme poverty at "The Hog in the Pound," an alehouse at the corner of Swallow Street; an example of great talents rendered useless by their possessor.' Miss Hawkins follows this narrative, and the artist's decease is announced in the Gentleman's Magazine of the same year. It is proper to state, however, that Mr. Smith, his pupil, has recorded a less melancholy account of Sherwin's death, which took place, he says, 'at the house of the late Mr. Robert Wilkinson, the printseller in Cornhill, who kindly attended him, afforded him every comfort, and paid respect to his remains, his body having been conveyed to Hampstead and buried in a respectable manner in the churchyard, near the east corner of the front entrance.'

He was barely forty when he died. Prints from his engravings are still highly esteemed by collectors. If his talent was not of the very first class, it was still of too valuable a kind to be flung in the kennel—utterly degraded and wasted.



SIR JOSHUA'S PUPIL.

A young apprentice with very little heart in the study of his craft, after the manner of young apprentices, toiling in a watch and clock-maker's shop in the town of Devonport, heard one day the fame of great Sir Joshua's achievements in London sounding through the county—became conscious that the good folks of the shire took pride in the son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, Master of Plympton Grammar School. Why should not he, the apprentice, become as great, or nearly so, a credit to Devonport, his birthplace, as was Sir Joshua to Plympton, his birthplace? Could one man only have art abilities and ambitions, and make for himself the opportunity to employ and gratify them? So the apprentice asked himself. And he must have been a clever fellow that apprentice! He soon convinced himself—that was easy: but he convinced his family; he convinced several of his townsmen—a more difficult task,—that the best thing they could do with him was to send him up to town to study under his countryman, Sir Joshua, and to become, like him, a great painter. He had his way at last. In his twenty-fifth year he was painting in the studio of Reynolds, living under his roof.

After all, his dearest wishes gratified, perhaps the pupil was little better off. If cleverness, like fever, were contagious, it had been all very well. But the master was but an indifferent master. He could not, or would not, instruct. He was himself somewhat deficient in education—had few rules—only a marvellous love and perception of the beautiful, and an instinctive talent for its reproduction on his canvas. It was as certain as it was innate, but not to be expressed in words, or communicated or reasoned upon in any way. The deeds of genius are things done, as of course, for no why or wherefore, but simply because there is no help for it but to do them. So the pupils painted in the studio of their pseudo-preceptor for a certain number of years, copying his works; or, when sufficiently advanced, perhaps working at his backgrounds, brushing away at draperies, or such conventional fillings in of pictures, and then went their ways to do what they listed, and for the most part to be heard of no more in art chronicles. They had probably been of more use to the painter than he had been to them. Certainly our friend the clockmaker's apprentice was. For when there arose a cry of 'Who wrote Sir Joshua's discourses, if not Burke?' this pupil could give satisfactory evidence in reply. He had heard the great man, his master, walking up and down in the library, as in the intervals of writing, at one and two o'clock in the morning. A few hours later, and he had the results in his hands. He was employed to make a fair copy of the lecturer's rough manuscript for the reading to the public. He had noted Dr. Johnson's handwriting, for he had revised the draft, sometimes altering to a wrong meaning, from his total ignorance of the subject and of art: but never a stroke of Burke's pen was there to be seen. The pupil, it must be said for him, never lost faith in his master. Vandyke, Reynolds, Titian—he deemed these the great triumvirate of portraiture. Comparing them, he would say, that Vandyke's portraits were like pictures, Sir Joshua's like the reflections in a looking-glass, and Titian's like the real people. And he was useful to the great painter in another way, for he sat for one of the children in the Count Ugolino picture (the one in profile with the hand to the face). While posed for this, he was introduced as a pupil of Sir Joshua's to Mr. Edmund Burke, and turned to look at that statesman. 'He is not only an artist, but has a head that would do for Titian to paint,' said Mr. Burke. He served, too, another celebrated man. With Ralph, Sir Joshua's servant, he went to the gallery of Covent Garden Theatre, to support Dr. Goldsmith's new comedy, She Stoops to Conquer, on the first night of its performance. While his friends are trooping to the theatre, the poor author is found sick and shivering with nervousness, wandering up and down the Mall in St. James's Park. He can hardly be induced to witness the production of his own play. Johnson's lusty laugh from the front row of a side box gives the signal to the worthy claque, who applaud to an almost dangerous extent, in their zeal for their friend, because there runs a rumour that Cumberland and Ossian Macpherson and Hugh Kelly are getting up a hiss in the pit.

'How did you like the play?' asked Goldsmith of the young painter, who had been clapping his hands until they ached, in the gallery by the side of good Mr. Ralph.

'I wouldn't presume to be a judge in such a matter,' the art-student answered.

'But did it make you laugh?'

'Oh, exceedingly.'

'That's all I require,' said Goldsmith, and sent him box tickets for the author's benefit night, that he might go and laugh again.

Sir Joshua's pupil was James Northcote, a long-lived man, born at Devonport in 1746, and dying at his London house, in Argyll Place, Regent Street, in 1831. If he had a Titianesque look in his youth, he possessed it still more in his age. Brilliant eyes, deeply set; grand projecting nose; thin, compressed lips; a shrewd, cat-like, penetrating look; fine, high, bald forehead, yellow and polished, though he often hid this with a fantastic green velvet painting cap, and straggling bunches of quite white hair behind his ears. A little, meagre man, not more than five feet high, in a shabby, patched dressing-gown, almost as old as himself, leading a quiet, cold, penurious life. He never married. He had never even been in love. He had never had the time, or he had never had the passion necessary for such pursuits, or he was too deeply devoted to his profession. He was always, brush in hand, perched up on a temporary stage, painting earnestly, fiercely, 'with the inveterate diligence of a little devil stuccoing a mud wall!' cried flaming Mr. Fuseli.

Haydon, with a letter of introduction from Prince Hoare, called upon Northcote. He was shown first into a dirty gallery, then up-stairs into a dirtier painting-room, and then, under a high window, with the light falling full on his bald grey head, stood a diminutive wizened figure in an old blue striped dressing-gown, his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. Looking keenly with his little shining eyes at his visitor, he opened the letter, read it, and with the broadest Devon dialect, said—

'Zo you mayne tu bee a peinter, doo 'ee? What zort of peinter?'

'Historical painter, sir.'

'Heestoricaul peinter! Why, ye'll starve with a bundle of straw under yeer head.'

Presently he read the note again.

'Mr. Hoare zays you're studying anatomy; that's no use—Sir Joshua didn't know it. Why should you want to know what he didn't?'

'But Michael Angelo did, sir.'

'Michael Angelo! what's he tu du here? You must peint portraits here!'

Haydon was roused to opposition.

'But I won't!'

'Won't,' screamed the little man, 'but you must! Your vather isn't a moneyed man, is he?'

'No, sir, but he has a good income, and will maintain me for three years.'

'Will hee? Hee'd better make 'ee mentein yeerzelf.'

'Do you think, sir, that I ought to be a pupil to anybody?'

'No,' said Northcote. 'Who's to teach 'ee here? It'll be throwing your vather's money away.'

'Mr. Opie, sir, says I ought to be.'

'Hee zays zo, does hee? ha, ha, ha, ha! he wants your vather's money.'

He received many visitors in his studio. He was constantly at home, and liked to talk over his work, for he never paused on account of the callers. He never let go his palette even. He went to the door with a 'Gude God!' his favourite exclamation in his west country dialect, 'what, is it you? Come in:' and then climbed his way back to his canvas, asking and answering in his cool, self-possessed way, all about the news of the day. Yet he was violent and angry, and outspoken sometimes, was Sir Joshua's loyal pupil.

'Look at the feeling of Raphael!' said some one to him.

'Bah!' cried the little man. 'Look at Reynolds; he was all feeling! The ancients were baysts in feeling, compared to him.' And again: 'I tell 'ee the King and Queen could not bear the presence of he. Do you think he was overawed by they? Gude God! He was poison to their sight. They felt ill at ease before such a being—they shrunk into themselves, overawed by his intellectual superiority. They inwardly prayed to God that a trap-door might open under the feet of the throne, by which they might escape—his presence was too terrible!'

Certainly he was possessed by no extravagant notions of the divinity of blood-royal.

'What do you know,' he was asked, 'of the Prince of Wales, that he so often speaks of you?'

'Oh, he knows nothing of me, nor I of him—it's only his bragging!' the painter grandly replied.

He could comprehend the idea of distinction of ranks little more than old Mr. Nollekens, who would persist in treating the royal princes quite as common acquaintances, taking them by the button-hole, forgetful altogether of the feuds of the king's family, and asking them how their father did? with an exclamation to the heir-apparent of, 'Ah! we shall never get such another when he's gone!' Though there was little enough veneration for the king in this, as Nollekens proved, when he measured the old monarch, sitting for his bust, from the lip to the forehead, as though he had been measuring a block of marble, and at last fairly stuck the compasses into his Majesty's nose. Even the king, who was not very quick at a joke, could not fail to see the humour of the situation, and laughed immensely.

Modern taste prefers Northcote's portraits to his more pretentious works. The glories of Mr. Alderman Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery have pretty well passed away. However, Northcote's pictures were among the best of the collection. His 'Arthur and Hubert,' and the 'Murder of the Princes in the Tower,' and 'The Interment of the Bodies by torchlight,' were very forcible and dramatic works of art, and possessed more natural attractions than the pictures of many of his competitors. His pupilage with Sir Joshua prevented his falling into the washed leather and warm drab errors of tone that then distinguished the English school of historical painting. In the picture of the Burial of the Princes, Fuseli criticised—

'You shouldn't have made that fellow holding up his hands to receive the bodies. You should have made him digging a hole for them. How awfully grand; with a pickaxe, digging, dump, dump, dump!'

'Yes,' Northcote answered; 'but how am I to paint the sound of dump, dump, dump?'

The Boydell pictures were for a long time very popular, and the engravings of them enjoyed a large sale.

Of course, Northcote despised Hogarth. Abuse of that painter seemed to be one of the duties of the British historical artist of that day. Yet he paid him homage; he painted a series of pictures, Hogarthian in subject, and proved to the satisfaction of everybody, one would think, the absolute superiority of Hogarth. Mr. Northcote's moral subjects, illustrative of vice and virtue, in the progress of two young women, are not to be mentioned in the same breath with the 'Mariage a la Mode.' Not merely were they deficient in expression—they were not equal in point of art-execution, though of course the more modern painter had planned to excel in both these qualities. But Northcote's portraits are really admirable—broad and vigorous—with much of Sir Joshua's charm of colour, if not his charm of manner exactly.

For fifty years he lived in Argyll Place, passing the greatest part of that time in his studio—a small room not more than nine feet by twelve, crowded with the conventional articles of vertu that were then considered to be the indispensable properties of a painter. His maiden sister—'Northcote in petticoats,' she was often called, she was so like him in face, figure, and manner—superintended his frugal household. Its economy was simple enough. The brother and sister were of one opinion. 'Half the world died of over-feeding,' they said. They went into an opposite extreme, and nearly starved themselves. When there was a cry in the land about scarcity of food, they did not heed the panic; they were accustomed to a minimum of sustenance, they could hardly be deprived of that. Fuseli, who sowed his satire broadcast, exclaimed one day: 'What! does Northcote keep a dog? What does he live upon? Why, he must eat his own fleas!' But the painter did not attempt to force his opinions upon others, so the kennel and the kitchen fared better than the parlour. The servants were indulgently treated, permitted to eat as they pleased, and die in their own fashion—of repletion or apoplexy, if it seemed good to them.

If he was cold and callous and cynical to the rest of the world, he was ever good and kind to the pinched elderly lady his sister. By his will he gave directions that everything in his house should remain undisturbed, that there should be no sale of his property in her lifetime. He was counselled by considerate friends to have all his pictures sold immediately after his funeral while his name was fresh in the memory of the public; it was urged that his estate would benefit very much by the adoption of such a course. 'Gude God, no!' the old man would cry; 'I haven't patience with ye! Puir thing! d'ye think she'll not be sufficiently sad when my coffin be borne away, and she be left desolate! Tearing my pictures from the walls, and ransacking every nook and corner, and packing up and carting away what's dearer to her than household gods, and all for filthy lucre's sake! No; let her enjoy the few years that will be spared to her; when she walks about the house let her feel it all her own, such as it be, and nothing missing but her brother. I'd rather my bones were torn from my grave, and scattered to help repair the roads, than that a single thing should be displaced here to give her pain. Ye'll drive me mad!'