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bar to all epic glory. Of his fitness for historic productions let his sketches speak. His studies, as those ruder designs are called, which usher in the finished performances, are all of a very different order. They were fac-similes of heads which he was commissioned to paint, or figures in academic postures, such as students draw; but there are no indications of a spirit aspiring to higher things: neither the court, the camp, the historian's page, nor the poet's song, had inspired him.

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JACKSON.

DURING the earlier days of art in Britain, a painter was required to be cunning in other crafts: he was, as the records of Henry III. tell us, carpenter, mason, glazier, house-painter, gilder, emblazoner, embroiderer, upholsterer, and tailor. We have no artist now, perhaps, who unites all or any of those professions with his own yet, collecting its members mainly from the humbler ranks of life, art has had amongst its followers men of fame and name who were bred to other pursuits: Inigo Jones, if we may credit the sarcastic Ben Jonson, was originally a carpenter; Sir Christopher Wren had been an astronomer and mathematician; Hogarth, a silver-chaser; Banks, a worker in earthenware; Romney a cabinet-maker; Bird, an ornamenter of tea-trays; and the painter, of whose life and works I am now about to write, was for some time a tailor.

John Jackson was born the 31st of May, 1778, at Lastingham, a little village in the North Riding of Yorkshire. His father, the tailor of the place, desirous of ensuring bread for his son, apprenticed him at an early age to his own business. I have heard that the boy had an internal dislike

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to the trade, and worked at it with no good will: he had, probably, no settled notion of what pursuit was most suitable; a country bred boy can see but little to select from. His aversion to the needle and shears arose wholly from his love of painting, which came upon him whilst at school, and grew and gathered strength, as he related, from visits which he made to the pictures in the galleries of Lord Mulgrave and Castle-Howard.

His first attempts were portraits of his school companions: these were made chiefly with the pencil, and of a small size: but though rough and rude, as all such things must be, they were not without a certain freedom and vigour of outline; and it is said that discerning persons saw in them the tokens of a spirit original and unborrowed. Cheered by such praise, and animated by an inward consciousness of talent, he sought to make nearer approaches than black lead could suffice for to the pictures which he admired. One of his neighbours, a house-painter, supplied him with such colours as he imagined necessary; and, after many a secret and unseen effort, he produced a portrait, in which he imitated, not unhappily, the light and shade of a picture by Reynolds. This was shown to the village schoolmaster, who happened to have some taste in art; he liked it so well, that he took it to Lord Mulgrave, who, pleased with the attempt, wished to see more sketches: these he liked still better, and sending for the young artist, was so pleased with his modest simplicity of manner, that he promised to keep him in mind.

These were not words of course or of courtesy:

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