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who alone could essentially serve him; for, of all the men I ever knew, he possessed least of that worldly knowledge to enable him to make his own way into the notice of the great world. I therefore wrote to Lord Bateman, who knew him, and who admired his talents, stating the above particulars, and urging him at the same time, for both our sakes, to give him countenance, and make him known. His lordship, for me, or for both our sakes, did so; and his remove from Bath to London proved as good a move as it was from Ipswich to Bath." The matchless vanity of this man made him believe not only that he was the sole cause of our painter's success in Bath; but that from his intercession with Lord Bateman sprung all the subsequent good fortune in London of the man who had already painted many noble productions, and who had exhibited them for thirteen years in succession in the Royal Academy.

He was now freed from this encumbrance, and continued his career in portraiture and landscape with fresh feeling and increasing success. His house was ample, his gallery was fit for the reception of the first in rank, and as the fame of the heads of Lord Killmorrey, Mr. Quin, Mr. Medlicote, Mr. Mosey, Dr. Charlton, Mr. Fischer, and Mrs. Thicknesse had gone before him, he soon found good employment. Sir Joshua Reynolds was then high in favour; but even the rapid execution of the President could not satisfy the whole demand; and there was room for another, who, to just delineation of character, added a force and a freedom which approached, and sometimes rivalled, Vandyke. A conversation or family piece of the king, queen, and the three royal sisters was much admired; indeed, the permanent splendour of his colours, and the natural and living air which he communicated to whatever he touched, made him already, in the estimation of many, a rival and a dangerous one of the President himself.

Among those who sat to him was the Dutchess of Devonshire-then in the bloom of youth, at once the loveliest of the lovely, and the gayest of the gay. But her dazzling beauty, and the sense which she entertained of the charms of her looks, and her conversation, took away that readiness of hand, and hasty happiness of touch, which belonged to him in his ordinary moments. The portrait was so little to his satisfaction, that he refused to send it to Chatsworth. Drawing his wet pencil across a mouth which all who saw it thought exquisitely lovely, he said, "Her grace is too hard for me." The picture was, I believe, destroyed. Among his papers were found two sketches of the dutchess,-both exquisitely graceful.

He had customers who annoyed him with other difficulties than those of too radiant loveliness. A certain lord, whom one of our biographers, out of compassion for rank, calls an alderman, came for his portrait; and that all might be worthy of his station, he had put on a new suit of clothes, richly laced, with a well-powdered wig. Down he sat, and put on a practised look of such importance and prettiness, that the artist, who was no flatterer either with tongue or pencil, began to laugh, and was heard to mutter, "This will never do!" The patient having composed himself, in conformity with his station, said, "Now, sir, I beg you will not overlook the dimple on my chin!" "Confound the dimple on your chin," said Gainsborough-"I shall neither paint the one nor the other." And he laid down his brushes, and refused to resume them. Garrick, too, and Foote, also came for their likenesses; he tried again and again, without success, and dismissed them in despair. "Rot them for a couple of rogues," he exclaimed, "they have every body's faces but their own." As the reader has already seen, David Garrick had the address to gratify Reynolds with a ludicrous account of this failure.

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With others he was more fortunate. But, excellent as many of his portraits are, it was a desire to excel in many things, which drew him from his favourite study of free and unsophisticated nature. There he surpassed all living men: in portrait, he was more than equalled by Reynolds. "Nature," says Thicknesse, in one of those moments when love of his early friend prevailed against hatred-"Nature sat to him in all her attractive attitudes of beauty; and his pencil traced, with peculiar and matchless facility, her finest and most delicate lineaments; whether it was the sturdy oak, the twisted eglantine, the mower whetting his scythe, the whistling ploughboy, or the shepherd under the hawthorn in the dale -all came forth equally chaste from his inimitable and fanciful pencil."

Though Gainsborough was not partial to the society of literary men, he seems to have been acquainted with Johnson and with Burke; and he lived on terms of great affection with Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He was also a welcome visiter at the table of Sir George Beaumont, a gentleman of graceful manners, who lived in old English dignity, and was, besides, a lover of literature and a painter of landscape. The latter loved to relate a curious anecdote of Gainsborough, which marks the unequal spirits of the man, and shows that he was the slave of wayward impulses which he could neither repress nor command. Sir George Beaumont, Sheridan, and Gainsborough had dined together, and the latter was more than usually pleasant and witty. The meeting was so much to their mutual satisfaction, that they agreed to have another day's happiness, and accordingly an early day was named when they should dine again together. They met, but a cloud had descended upon the spirit of Gainsborough, and he sat silent, with a look of fixed melancholy, which no wit could dissipate. At length he took Sheridan by the hand, led him out of the room, and said,

"Now don't laugh, but listen. I shall die soon-I know it-I feel it-I have less time to live than my looks infer-but for this I care not. What oppresses my mind is this-I have many acquaintances and few friends; and as I wish to have one worthy man to accompany me to the grave, I am desirous of bespeaking you-will you come-ay or no?" Sheridan could scarcely repress a smile, as he made the required promise; the looks of Gainsborough cleared up like the sunshine of one of his own landscapes; throughout the rest of the evening his wit flowed, and his humour run over, and the minutes, like those of the poet, winged their way with plea

sure.

Between Gainsborough and Reynolds there seems to have been little good-will-surely the feuds of artists are more numerous than those of any other community of Christians. They at one time appeared desirous of making something like an exchange of portraits; and Gainsborough obtained one sitting of the President-but the piece, like that of Thicknesse, was never completed. The cold and carefully meted out courtesy of the one, little suited with the curious mixture of candour and caprice in the other; and, like frost and fire, which some convulsion casts into momentary contact, they jostled, and then retired from each othernever more to meet till Gainsborough summoned Reynolds to his death-bed. They had, however, a better sense of natural dignity, than to carry their personal animosities, as Barry afterward did, into the council; and if they differed in life, so in life they were mutually reconciled. Peace be with their memories.

The dates of Gainsborough's various productions cannot now be ascertained: it was one of the pecuiarities of this eminent artist, that he never put his name to any of his compositions, and very seldom even the date. He knew that his own happy cha

racter was too strongly impressed on his works to be denied; and thought, I suppose, that the excelence of a painting had nothing to do with the day or the year of its execution. "The Woodman and his Dog, in the Storm," was one of his favourite compositions. There is a kind of rustic sublimity, new to English painting, in the heavenward look of the peasant, while the rain descends and the lightning flies. The same may be said of his "Shepherd's Boy in the Shower"-there is something inexpressibly mournful in the looks of both. The

former unfortunately perished; but the sketch remains, and shows it to have been a work of the highest order. He valued it at one hundred guineas, but could find no purchaser while he lived; his widow sold it for five hundred guineas, after his death, to Lord Gainsborough, whose house was subsequently burnt to the ground. Another of his own chief favourite works was the "Cottage Girl with her Dog and Pitcher," a happy and a well considered

scene.

Like Reynolds, he painted standing, in preference to sitting; and the pencils which he used had shafts sometimes two yards long. He stood as far from his sitter as he did from his picture, that the hues might be the same. He generally rose early, commenced painting between nine and ten o'clock, wrought for four or five hours, and then gave up the rest of the day to visits, to music, and to domestic enjoyment. He loved to sit by the side of his wife during the evenings, and make sketches of whatever occurred to his fancy, all of which he threw below the table, save such as were more than commonly happy, and those were preserved, and either finished as sketches or expanded into paintings. In summer he had lodgings at Hampstead, for the sake of the green fields and the luxury of pure air; and in winter he was often seen refreshing his eyes with light at the window, when fatigued with close employment.

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