studio with his painting-table, that had belonged to Gainsborough, with his little model of an old woman, dressed by the same great painter's hand, with the favourite palettes of Lawrence and Wilkie, hung up before him; with all the other curiosities, experiments, and studies in art that he had collected, now for the first time conveniently disposed around him-his enjoyment of his new painting-room was complete." But "like Wilkie, he laboured only a brief space in the first painting-room that he had ever completely prepared for his own occupation, before the hand of death arrested his pencil for ever!" A long and wearying illness, denoting a break up of the system, at last conquered his healthy nature; and the artist died on the 17th of February, 1847. He is buried in the cemetery of the Church of St. Mary, Paddington. The grave is marked by a marble cross, on the base of which these words are inscribed :— "In testimony of their affection for his memory, their remembrance of his virtues, and their respect for his genius as the painter of the coast scenery and cottage life of his native land, his widow and his two sons have raised this monument on the site of one which he erected to his mother and brother, with whom he is now buried." The spot possesses more of the elements of the picturesque than we find in suburban graveyards; and the tomb itself is characterised by its pure and simple taste. It is no melancholy pilgrimage to the painter's grave: trees wave near it in the green summer-time, and it speaks only of hopeful, happy rest. In Mr. Wilkie Collins's Life of his Father is a list of the pictures |