His wig was one which you might suppose he had borrowed from a scare-crow; all round it there projected a fringe of his own gray hair. He lived alone in a house which was never cleaned; and he slept on a bedstead with no other furniture than a blanket nailed on the one side. I wanted him to visit me-no, he said; he could not go out by day, because he could not spare time from his great picture and if he went out in the evening, the Academicians would waylay him, and murder him. In this solitary sullen life he continued till he fell ill, very probably from want of food sufficiently nourishing; and after lying two or three days under his blanket he had just strength enough left to crawl to his own door, open it, and lay himself down, with a paper in his hand, on which he had written his wish to be carried to the house of Mr. Carlyle (Sir Antony) in Soho Square. There he was taken care of; and the danger from which he had thus escaped seems to have cured his mental hallucinations. He cast his slough afterward; appeared decently dressed in his own gray hair, and mixed in such society as he liked.

"I should have told you, that a little before his illness, he had, with much persuasion, been induced to pass a night at some person's house in the country. When he came down to breakfast the next morning, and one asked how he had rested, he said, remarkably well: he had not slept in sheets for many years, and really he thought it was a very comfortable thing. He interlarded his conversation with oaths as expletives, but it was pleasant to con verse with him:-there was a frankness and anima tion about him which won good-will, as much as nis vigorous intellect commanded respect. There is a story of his having refused to paint portraits, and saying, in answer to applications, that there was a man in Leicester Square who did it. Bu this, he said, was false; for that he would at any

time have painted portraits, and have been glad to paint them."

It was during these periods of misgiving and des pondency that Barry thought of requesting a situation of moderate emolument from the government -he saw places of little labour and large profit filled by men of ordinary ability-and he thought ministers would prefer the help of the clever, if it were offered, to that of the dull. He failed to perceive that service of another kind than he could hope to render was the purchase-price of such situations. He applied for the place of painter to the ordnance department-he knew so little of what he asked for, that he was surprised to find that it was house painting only, and that the profits arose from th extent of the contracts; he next applied for tl situation of serjeant-painter to the court, but with drew his memorial on discovering that the salary was only eighteen pounds a year. His income at this time was necessarily very limited. From the funds he had sixty pounds a year, which paid his houserent and taxes; from the Academy he derived thirty pounds a year, as professor of painting; and it has been calculated that the sale of his prints brought annually £50 more. On eighty pounds a year, then, this eminent artist had to exist, and provide the materials of his profession-no wonder that his dress was mean and the appearance of his house sordid! Yet such was his independent spirit, and such his frugal habits, that he was never known either to borrow money or want it; and it was his honest pride that he preferred selling prints to strangers rather than to friends, nor would he sell to either if they chanced to utter a word unfavourable to his style of engraving.

He had even contrived to save something out of his pittance. To all appearance he was the poorest of the poor, and there was nothing about his house to tempt the spoiler: but thieves are a sagacious

race; they formed their own conclusions, and in an inroad on the painter's establishment ferreted out about £400, and carried the money clear off. The public were astonished to hear of the extent of his loss; and their astonishment increased when Barry, in a formal placard, exculpated common thieves, and attributed his loss to the thirty-nine members of the Royal Academy. The nephews of Timothy Hollis, John Hollis, and Hollis Edwards, sent him at this juncture a present of £50: it is pleasant to see benevolence descend like an inheritance.

Barry was in his fifty-first year when Sir Joshua Reynolds, full of years and fame, was removed from the world. For a long course of years they had lived in hostility; but in the contest the former alone had been the sufferer. Admiration of the antique, and of Michael Angelo, had brought Barry to a steak broiled with his own hands, and a pot of porter drawn by a suspicious publican. The theory which led him to this was not more his own than the President's; but this only made matters worse: he looked upon Reynolds as a voluntary traitor to the great cause-as a renegade to the principles which he advocated and taught; and he openly upbraided him with a mean love of gain in following the lucrative trade of portraiture. The friends of Reynolds replied, that this was the only line of art in which a painter could live like a gentleman, and that his performances were more than mere likenesses-that they partook very largely of the great historic style, and exhibited, in short, an English application of the principles of Michael Angelo. Barry, for a long time, closed his eyes on this ingenious theory, and continued his reproaches; but it is pleasing to be told, as we are by Dr. Fryer, that "for several years before Sir Joshua's death this hostility had ceased; that they had at length the good sense and candour to acknowledge each other's deserts, and were not a little chagrined that any

misunderstanding should ever have clouded their free intercourse."

On the death of Reynolds, Barry came to the Academy and pronounced a glowing eulogium upon him as a man and an artist. This change astonished many, but it was consistent with his character: he was of an open and generous nature, easily kindled into anger, not difficult to appease, and liable, like most violent men, to those sudden revulsions of feeling which surprise friends and perplex biographers. His eloquence was rewarded: the niece of Sir Joshua, the Marchioness of Thomond, made him a present of her uncle's painting-chair-it was borne home in triumph to Castle Street, and a letter of thanks addressed to the lady, in which he compared the gift with the celebrated chair of Pindar, which was shown so many years in the porch of Olympia. With better feeling he reflected that it had been instrumental in "perpetuating the negligent honest exteriors of the authors of the Rambler and the Traveller;" and that it had been pressed "by Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse;" and concluded by declaring, that in him it should find a reverential conservator while God permitted it to remain under his care.*

Barry, having obtained what (with his notions and habits) amounted to independence, employed his time much to his own liking: he had long indulged the wish to paint the Progress of Theology-and his famous picture of Pandora was the commencement of the series. He begun these designs soon after the completion of the Adelphi pictures-they were often set aside, and again resumed-disappointment by degrees laid a chilling hand upon him -and he was visited too by those misgivings of

* On the death of Barry, this celebrated chair found its way, after a variety of fortune, into the hands of an auctioneer, whose hammer at length consigned it to a safe and suitable sanctuary-the studio of Sir Thomas. Lawrence

spirit to which the sons of genius are peculiarly heirs. The Progress of the Mosaic Doctrines, however, was sketched; and something like the first conceptions for the pieces designed to imbody the coming of our Saviour could be traced at his death among the chaos of his papers. Of a great work thus imperfectly shadowed out, who can give any account? Rude sketcnes may indicate the main purpose and aim, but these are liable to such changes in the execution, that a finished work rarely corresponds with the original design.

At intervals, while this undertaking was his regular task, he sought refreshment in the pleasures of controversy, and wrote and published his celebrated Letter to the Dilettanti Society. In this workwhich is neither commendable in aim nor temperate in language-he imbodied almost all his disputes with mankind collectively and individually. After describing the leading principles of national artthe objects which the Royal Academy had been instituted to accomplish, and the purposes to which their money, as well as their energies, ought to be directed-Barry plunged into the actual conduct of the Academy's affairs-denounced private combinations and jealousies-asserted that the funds were dissipated by secret intrigues-and, as a finishing touch to this picture of weakness and corruption, proposed, seriously to all appearance, that whenever the judgment of the body was appealed to, the honest vote of each member should be secured by oath!

On the appearance of this bitter diatribe in 1797, the whole Academy, with the exception of Joseph Nollekens, declared war against the Professor of Painting. That Barry should have lost his temper can surprise no one; but that a public body, composed of the assembled talent in art of a great nation, should have lost temper too, must remain a matter of surprise to all: yet so it happened.. The