That Barry was very proud of his performancè may be easily believed. "It will be exceedingly hard," he says, in his celebrated letter to the Dilettanti Society, "if the benefit of the laws should be withheld from the painter of such a work as that on Human Culture; which, for public interest and ethical utility of subject-for the castigated purity of Grecian design-for beauty, grace, vigorous effect, and execution-stands so successfully in the view and neighbourhood of the so justly celebrated Orleans collection." There were many to smile at the absurdities of some parts of the Six Pictures, who could not feel the depth of mind which sought to unite them into one harmonious whole. To see the River Thames carried by Tritons, and Dr. Burney in the costume of the year 1778 playing a tune to Drake and Raleigh, excited laughter. I am by no means pleased," said a Dowager, putting her fan before her face, "to see good Dr. Burney with a parcel of naked girls dabbling in a horse pond." A young lady from the north, of great beauty and wit, went to take a look at the painter's Elysium.

She looked earnestly for a while, and said to Mr. Barry, "The ladies have not yet arrived in this Paradise of yours." “O, but they have, madam,” said the painter, with a smile; "they reached Elysium some time ago; but I could find no place so fit for creatures so bright and beautiful as behind yon very luminous cloud-they are there, and very happy, I assure you."

As a relief from the toil of this extensive work, he took up his pen, and in a long and able description and dissertation maintained the excellence both of the subject he had chosen, and the way in which he had handled it. This performance, amid all its knowledge and eloquence, has a strong infusion of bitter feeling; the allusions to those who grow rich and important in pursuing the more sordid branches of art, are frequent and sharp. "Mr. Barry's exhi

bition," writes Dr. Johnson, "was opened the same day, and a book was published to recommend it, which, if you read, you will find decorated with some satirical strictures of Sir Joshua Reynolds and others. I have not escaped. You must think with some esteem of Barry for the comprehension of his design." These sarcasms of Barry produced a letter bearing in every line the mental impress of Edmund Burke: it was universally ascribed to his pen, though to this moment unacknowledged. The imagination, the vigour of thought, the varied knowledge and skill of hand which the Six Pictures display, are at the outset admitted, and then the critic quits the canvass to fall sharply upon the dissertation. Barry had spoken with levity or irreverence of the art of portrait-painting; he had drawn a distinction between the poetic and the merely imitative, which separated them as far as the south is from the north. Burke urges the propriety of uniting both in historic composition, thus:

"Without the power of combining and abstracting, the most accurate knowledge of forms and colours will produce only uninteresting trifles; but without any accurate knowledge of forms and colours, the most happy power of combining and abstracting will be absolutely useless; for there is no faculty of the mind which can bring its energy into effect, unless the memory be stored with ideas for it to work upon. These ideas are the materials of invention, which is only a power of combining and abstracting, and which, without such materials, would be in the same state as a painter without canvass, boards, and colours. Experience is the only means of acquiring ideas of any kind, and continued observation and study upon one class of objects the only way of rendering them accurate. The painter who wishes to make his picture what fine pictures must be-nature elevated and improved➡

must first of all gain a perfect knowledge of nature as it is. Before he endeavours, like Lysippus, to make men as they ought to be, he must know how to render them as they are; he must acquire an accurate knowledge of all parts of their body and countenance. To know anatomy will be of little use, unless physiology and physiognomy are joined with it, so that the artist may know what peculiar combinations and proportions of features constitute different characters, and what effect the passions and affections of the mind have upon those features. This is a science which all the theorists in the world cannot teach, and which can only be acquired by observation, practice, and attention. It is not by copying antique statues, or by giving a loose to the imagination in what are called poetical compositions, that artists will be enabled to produce works of real merit, but by a laborious and accurate investigation of nature upon the principles observed by the Greeks -first, to make themselves thoroughly acquainted with the common forms of nature, and then, by selecting and combining, to form compositions according to their own elevated conceptions. This is the principle of true poetry, as well as of painting and sculpture."

The ease and elegance with which these important truths are expressed will be felt by many who are not perhaps aware that it was the theory, as it was the practice, of Barry to extract all that is noble in art from all that is elevated in nature. The shafts of his satire were directed against the regular manufacturers of portraits: but he nowhere insinuates that imagination may fly its own free flight, or that poetic art is any thing else than purified nature. He endeavours to distinguish between painters, who can counterfeit only such faces as live before them, and those of the higher order, described so well by Sir Philip Sydney," who, having no law but wit, bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for the eye

to see as the constant, though lamenting look of Lucretia, when she punished in herself another's fault; wherein he painteth not Lucretia-whom he never saw-but painteth the outward beauty of such a virtue." It was the fashion of the day to claim the honours of historical art for portraiture, and Burke's letter could not be unacceptable to Reynolds, whose practice the Dissertation of Barry was obviously designed to impeach.

Penny, professor of painting, dying in 1782, Barry was elected in his place; and as this eleva tion happened during the intensest period of his labour upon the Six Pictures, he was unable for nearly two years to prepare a proper course of Lectures-the man who had to work ten hours a-day for fame, and four hours for bread, was not likely to have much time to spare for works of advice or instruction. Reynolds, as President, made some allusion to this unseemly delay on the part of the new Professor: he was answered with great asperity by the impudent Barry. "If I had no more to do in the course of my Lectures than produce such poor mistaken stuff as your Discourses, I should soon have them ready for reading." It is reported that these intemperate words were uttered with his fist clenched, and in a posture of

menace.

At length, on the second day of March, 1784, he delivered his first Lecture on painting. Much was looked for from his knowledge and talents; and the audience was very numerous and very attentive. Barry's manner was eager, his utterance impressive; and, on the whole, expectation was not disappointed.

Of these Lectures he delivered six-they embrace all that is included in the word Art, and discuss with abundance of boldness the threefold mystery of conception, composition, and colour. They are the echo of his letters and of his conversation, their

one great object being to impress on the minds of the students the utter vanity of all art below the historical. As literary compositions they exhibit neither strict propriety of expression, nor perfect developement of thought; but these defects are far more than atoned for by an earnest feeling for whatever is noble in art, and that readiness of illustration, which can only arise from extensive and matured knowledge, and rapid apprehension. They are, throughout, deformed by sarcastic allusions to modern works and living artists. Barry was a man of severe deportment, who seldom smiled, and conceived a jest beneath the dignity of human nature; his sarcastic remarks, therefore, were expressed and uttered with a deep and cutting air of solemnity"he placed his life,” as the poet says, “in the wound." The turbulent, uneasy, fierce temper of the man was ever and anon breaking out-nor is it possible to deny that envy was occasionally the inspiration of his periods. His Lectures spared few of his more successful brethren, and could not, therefore, be expected to pass over the President himself, who was observed, it is said, to avoid the pelting of the storm of invective, by moving the trumpet from his ear, and even seek refuge in a real or pretended nap. Of those ungracious allusions Reynolds often complained-and sarcastically excused his frequent nodding by saying that he fell asleep only at the personalities. Nor did Barry himself in after-life look back upon them with pleasure. "Sir Joshua, to say the truth," he observed but this was when Sir Joshua was no more-"acted somewhat weakly with respect to me; and, on the other side, I was much to blame with respect to him: my notions of candour and liberality between artists who were friends were too juvenile and romantic for human frailty in the general occurrences of life. Disappointed in not finding more in Sir Joshua, I was not then in a humour to make a just estimate