life away. He was buried in the vault under the new church of St. Mary-le-bone.

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Talking with the painter,' said Hazlitt, is like conversing with the dead. You see a little old man, eighty years of age, pale and fragile, with eyes gleaming like the lights hung in tombs. He seems little better than a ghost, and hangs wavering and trembling on the very edge of life. You would think a breath would blow him away, and yet what fine things he says.'-' Yes!' observed some one, and what ill-natured things; they are malicious to the last word. He is a bottle of aquafortis, which corrodes every thing it touches. Except gold,' said Hazlitt; he never drops upon Sir Joshua or the great masters.' -Well; but is he not flowing over,' persisted the other, with envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness? He is as spiteful as a woman; and then his niggardness. Did he ever give any thing?'—Yes; his advice,' said Hazlitt; and very unpleasant it is."" This is the picture of an ungracious sort of man; and yet our painter not without his mild and gentle moments; nay, he had them frequently. He was pleased to talk with ladies, yet he never was in love; he considered them as wasters of time and of money. He was abstemious by nature: he had to carry on no warfare with passions wild and strong he had, by rote, all the old saws which make frugality a virtue; and love of saving, and of long life, united to persuade him that one half of mankind die in youth from intemperance. This he not only believed himself, but his maiden sister believed in it also; and as the latter had

was

the furnishing of the table, she spread it so sparingly, that visiters who accidentally dropped in at meal-time marvelled how they survived such continued self-denial. He was mean in his apparel: his house seemed the abode of a sloven or a niggard; and in his conversation he hovered between the satirist and the miser.

The Prince of Wales, when a young man, met the painter, and was much pleased with his conversation. "What do you know of his Royal Highness?" enquired Sir Joshua. "Nothing," answered Northcote. "Nothing, sir! why, he says, he knows you very well.” Pooh !" said Northcote, "that is only his brag." The president smiled and muttered," Bravely said, bravely said."

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He prided himself on his foresight; and it was one of his maxims to leave little to chance and less to friendship. He committed as much of his fame as he could to the durability of marble, and the genius of Chantrey; but he resolved to trust no one with his life and character; and towards the close of his days wrote a copious memoir of himself, and put it into the hands of a friend, with a formal request that he would see it published after his death." He bore in mind how little either Burke or Boswell had fulfilled the hopes of Reynolds, when he left them legacies and pictures; and probably thought, in writing his own life, he carried economy farther than ever his great master had contemplated. Northcote, nevertheless, was, least of all men, to be trusted with such a work. He seldom made a calm estimate or took a dispassionate view of

any thing; he dipped all subjects, save his historical pictures, in the light of heaven, or the darkness of hell; with him, in the morning a man was all that was good and great; in the afternoon he was a cheat and a swindler. His opinion of himself was, perhaps, not liable to such fluctuations; but the man who cannot make a fair estimate of the merits of others cannot be expected to be just to his own. His life was an almost continued aggression against mankind artists in particular: his conversation was a controversy, sometimes mild and tolerant, but often violent and rancorous; and all that he said, and perhaps much that he wrote, required to be taken with some abatement.

a

of

Of his system of study, and habits as an artist, little may be said. He was an early riser; remained long at his easel; sought models in all things to aid his conception; and was long in pleasing himself with his outline or his colours. He attained all by a slow, protracted, and laborious process. He seemed never to see clearly what he desired to do; and worked more from artificial rules than from the fulness and energy nature. When he commenced an historical picture, it was his practice to crowd his studio with all manner of costumes, and weapons, and matters which belonged to the era he wished to illustrate. These he painted in brightly enough; but the human character and sentiment which had to give life and feeling to the whole, could not be found without outlay of imagination; and Northcote complained that he could neither find in life or fancy such heads as he desired. He liked to

have friends beside him when he painted. Work never interrupted the flow of conversation; he could talk and paint, argue and paint, criticise and paint: with him, in fact, painting was much of a mechanical process.

Northcote's uninspired industry has added nothing, which promises to last, to our stock of literature. An essay, in which he illustrates, with some ingenuity, the untenable position of Barry, that poetry is only true when it can be painted, he considered, he told me, the cleverest thing he had ever written. He was not one of those who believed, with Spenser,

"That poets' wit surpasseth painters' far,

In picturing the parts of beauty daynt."

Of his merits as a painter, I have already said much in the course of my narrative. His chief excellence lay in a certain dignity with which he invested his compositions. He desired to exalt all he touched; and this is true of his portraits, as well as of his historical pieces. The clear manner in which he makes his canvass tell his story is another merit of a high order; this made the pictures he painted for the Shakspeare Gallery more popular than the more imaginative works of Fuseli. His chief faults were defective drawing, dull colouring, and that want of pictorial conception which gives to his works the appearance of having come bit by bit, and with reluctance, from his mind. In his best works there is little to surprise, elevate, or electrify.

BEAUMONT.

WHEN Voltaire called on Congreve, he addressed him as a dramatist of wit and imagination. “I am not an author, sir," said the retired poet; "I am a gentleman."- "Sir," replied the sarcastic Frenchman, " had you been but a gentleman, I should not have visited you." The weakness thus rebuked is a general one, but not universal; and among the exceptions I know few more brilliant than the person of whose life and talents I am now about to write; he adorned the gentleman with the artist, and the artist with the gentleman, and stood high in the ranks both of genius and courtesy.

Sir George Howland Beaumont, Baronet, was born on the 6th of November, 1753; his father died whilst he was yet a child, and left him to the care of his mother, a lady of taste and talent. Her maiden name was Rachel Howland: some property it seems came into the family through the marriage, as her son took her name; but no alliance could add to the dignity of his paternal descent. Among his ancestors he could point to Bohemond Prince of Antioch, son of Robert Guiscard, who shook the throne of the Emperor of Constantinople