sary to enable men to comprehend and relish the nobler productions of the poet and the painterthen who has not judged by guess and admired by random some of the most glorious works of the human mind? That it cost Reynolds much time and study to understand and admire them is nothing: he had to banish preconceived false notions; to dismiss idolized and merely conventional beauties, and strip himself of laboured absurdities, with which he had been bedecking himself from his infancy. He had to rise out of false art into true nature-and this was not to be done in a day. But is it necessary that all men should start with a false theory? The acquisition of a natural taste in poetry, or a correct musical apprehension, may be the work of time with some, but they are as certainly a kind of inspiration in others. Reynolds himself seems to have thought with more accuracy when he wrote as follows:

"The man of true genius," says he, "instead of spending all his hours, as many artists do while they are at Rome, in measuring statues and copying pictures, soon begins to think for himself, and endeavours to do something like what he sees. 1 consider general copying a delusive kind of industry; the student satisfies himself with the appearance of doing something; he falls into the dan gerous habit of imitating without selecting, and of labouring without any determinate object; as it requires no effort of the mind, he sleeps over his work, and those powers of invention and disposi tion, which ought particularly to be called out and put in action, lie torpid, and lose their energy for want of exercise. How incapable of producing any thing of their own those are who have spent most of their time in making finished copies, is an observation well known to all who are conversant with our art."

To Reynolds's own written account I may add

the testimony of a friend, who often conversed with him upon the glories of Rome:-" When arrived in that garden of the world"-says Northcote-" that great temple of the arts, his time was diligently and judiciously employed in such a manner as might have been expected from one of his talents and virtue. He contemplated with unwearied attention and ardent zeal the various beauties which marked the style of different schools and different ages. It was with no common eye that he beheld the productions of the great masters. copied and sketched in the Vatican such parts of the works of Raphael and Michael Angelo as he thought would be most conducive to his future excellence, and by his well-directed study acquired, while he contemplated the best works of the best masters, that grace of thinking, to which he was principally indebted for his subsequent reputation as a portrait painter."

He

Much, however, as Reynolds in his lectures inculcates the necessity of constantly copying the great masters-it appears that he did but little in this way himself. "Of the few copies which he made while at Rome," says Malone, "two are now in the possession of the Earl of Inchquin, who married his niece, Miss Palmer, St. Michael the Archangel slaying the dragon, after Guido, and the school of Athens from Raphael-both masterly performances." Rome at that period swarmed with those English connoisseurs and travellers of taste whom Hogarth so sharply satirized and hated so cordially; they were all anxious to have copies of favourite works made by an artist so able as Reynolds; he felt, however, the folly of multiplying pictures, and eluded their alluring offers. While I was at Rome," he says, "I was very little employed by travellers, and that little I always considered as so much time lost."

Of the character and course of his technical stu

dies in Rome he has left a minute account; which, however, is chiefly valuable to the student in painting-for the language is that of the craft. Having filled his mind with the character of the great painters, and possessed himself, as he believed, with no small portion of their spirit, he proceeded to examine into the mechanical sorcery of their execution, and to dissect the varied colours which were blended on their canvass :-"The Leda in the Colonna Palace by Correggio," he says, "is dead-coloured white, and black or ultra-marine in the shadows; and over that is scumbled thinly and smooth a warmer tint-I believe caput mortuum. The lights are mellow, the shadows bluish, but mellow. The picture is painted on a panel in a broad, large manner, but finished like an enamel; the shadows harmonize, and are lost in the ground.

"The Adonis of Titian in the Colonna Palace is dead-coloured white, with the muscles marked bold; the second painting has scumbled a light colour over it; the lights a mellow flesh-colour; the shadows in the light parts of a faint purple hue; at least they were so at first. That purple hue seems to be occasioned by blackish shadows under, and the colour scumbled over them. I copied the Titian with white, umber, minio, cinnabar, black; the shadows thin of colour.

"Poussin's landscapes in the Verospi palace are painted on a dark ground made of Indian red and black. The same ground might do for all other subjects as well as landscapes.

"In respect to painting the flesh tint, after it has been finished with very strong colours, such as ultra-marine and carmine, pass white over it very, very thin with oil. I believe it will have a wonderful effect. Make a finished sketch of every portrait you intend to paint, and by the help of that dispose your living model; then finish at the first time on a ground made of Indian red and black."

Through all his letters and memorandums there are scattered allusions to his favourite art, and the works of the chief masters; and opinions are given, and a scale of comparative excellence laid down, in a manner equally clear, candid, and accurate. It is true that he dictates rules for the guidance of others which he did not follow himself. When he became acquainted with all the wiles and stratagems of position and light and shade, he could dispense with the practice of making sketches of portraits, and depend on his experience.

"In comparison with Titian and Paul Veronese," he observes, "all the other Venetian masters appear hard; they have in a degree the manner of Rembrandt-all mezzotinto, occasioned by scumbling over their pictures with some dark oil or colour. There is little colour in the shadows, but much oil -they seem to be made only of a drying oil composed of red lead and oil. There are some artists who are diligent in examining pictures, and yet are not at all advanced in their judgment; although they can remember the exact colour of every figure in the picture; but not reflecting deeply on what they have seen, or making observations to themselves, they are not at all improved by the crowd of particulars that swim on the surface of their brains; as nothing enters deep enough into their minds to do them benefit through digestion. A painter should form his rules from pictures rather than from books or precepts. Rules were first made from pictures, not pictures from rules. Every picture an artist sees, whether the most excellent or the most ordinary, he should consider from whence that fine effect, or that ill effect, proceeds; and then there is no picture ever so indifferent, but he may look at to his profit."

On our English connoisseurs and travellers of taste he has written some sharp and just remarks. This country, at that period, and long after, exported

swarms of men with the malady of vertu upon them, who brought back long lists of pictures, and catalogues of artist's names-and set up for dictators here at home with no other stock. "The manner," says Reynolds, "of the English travellers in general, and of those who most pique themselves on studying vertu, is that, instead of examining the beauties of these works of fame, and why they are esteemed, they only inquire the subject of the picture and the name of the painter, the history of a statue, and where it is found, and write that down. Some Englishmen, while I was in the Vatican, came there, and spent above six hours in writing down whatever the antiquary dictated to them. They scarcely ever looked at the paintings the whole time."

Reynolds extended his inquiries among the remains of ancient art, and endeavoured to ascertain, by what he could glean from the classic writers, and by what he could discover in the remaining statues, how far the paintings of ancient Greece resembled those of modern Rome. His conclusions can only be considered as expressions of belief, on a subject with regard to which we have not the materials of certain knowledge. He staid in Rome till his judgment ripened, and gazed on the productions of Raphael and Michael Angelo till the mercury of his taste rose to the point of admiration. He then concluded, that as those works were the most perfect in the world, the paintings of antiquity must have been in character the same--in short, that the "grand style" had descended direct from Apelles to Raphael. From an anecdote in Pliny of the painter and the partridge, he conceived that a lively copy of nature was held as a vulgar thing by the painters of Greece, and that they approached living life no nearer than the sculptor of the Belvedere Apollo. This theory, however, appears to be contradicted by the Elgin marbles, and by the