money on bespoke pictures; others had paid money upon works begun, and the interest of the whole was concerned it would be only misleading the reader to say that Morland felt at all anxious respecting them. To him the completion of such commissions was a matter of total indifference; he knew that these patrons had doomed him to constant slavery, that they merely looked upon him as an engine which augmented their incomes, and of which they had only to keep the wheels oiled. When he reappeared, the gloom passed from their looks, and they hastened to share in the spoils arising from his paintings of the scenery of Leicestershire.

Yet wild and imprudent as he was, and sunk in almost constant debauchery, his skill seemed only to augment, and his rapidity of execution to increase. Indolence cannot be ranked among his sins. Pleasure he found could not be purchased without money; his companions were not the followers of an empty purse, and even Dirty Brookes himself, who fell a sacrifice in sharing Morland's excesses, was more moderate in his mirth when he was in danger of settling the reckoning from his own pocket. To get money, it was necessary to work; and certainly during his brief career he wrought diligently. Four thousand pictures, and most of them of great merit, which he left to continue his name, tell us that, with the sharp sword of necessity at his back, he laboured as diligently and successfully as if he had lived in wealth and in honour.

During this period Morland lived at Paddington, where he was visited by the popular pugilists of the day, by the most eminent horse-dealers, and by his never-failing companions the picture-merchants. He was a lover of guinea-pigs, dogs, rabbits, and squirrels; he extended his affection also to asses. At one time he was the owner of eight saddle-horses, which were kept at the White Lion; and that the place might be worthy of an artist's stud, he painted

the sign where they stood at livery with his own hand. He wished to be thought a consummate judge of horse-flesh and a dealer in the article. But he was taught that his wisdom did not lie in that way by two or three sagacious horse-jockeys, and began to find that all the cunning of the island was not monopolized by the picture-dealers. For indifferent horses he paid with excellent pictures; or, what was worse, with bills which he was not always, if ever, prepared to take up; and when due, purchased an extension of the time by the first picture he had ready. His wine-merchant too was in the discounting line, and obtained sometimes a picture worth fifty pounds for similar accommodation. "He heaped folly upon folly," says Hassell, "with such dire rapidity, that a fortune of ten thousand pounds per annum would have proved insufficient for the support of his waste and prodigality."

He was as vain as he was prodigal; was anxious for the smiles of the meanest of mankind; and as for flattery, any one might lay it on with a trowel. At the grossness of his humour all the hostlers laughed, and he that laughed loudest was generally rewarded with a half-crown or a pair of buckskin breeches little the worse for wear. His acquaintances on the north road were numerous; he knew the driver of every coach, and the pedigree of the horses, and taking his stand at Bob Bellamy's inn at Highgate, would halloo to the gentlemen of the whip as they made their appearance, and treat them to gin and brandy. "Frequently," says one of his biographers, "he would parade, with a pipe in his mouth, before the door of the house, and hail the carriages as they passed in succession before him; and, from being so well known, was generally greeted in return by a familiar salute from the postilion. The consequence he attached to this species of homage was almost beyond belief."

He once (we are told) received an invitation to

Barnet, and was hastening thither with Hassell and another friend, when he was stopped at Whetstone turnpike by a lumber or jockey cart, driven by two persons, one of them a chimney-sweep, who were disputing with the toll-gatherer. Morland endeavoured to pass, when one of the wayfarers cried, "What! Mr. Morland, won't you speak to a body!" The artist endeavoured to elude farther greeting, but this was not to be; the other bawled out so lustily, that Morland was obliged to recognise at last his companion and crony, Hooper, a tinman and pugilist. After a hearty shake of the hand, the boxer turned to his neighbour the chimney-sweep, and said, "Why, Dick, do n't you know this here gentleman? 't is my friend Mr. Morland." The sooty charioteer smiling a recognition, forced his unwelcome hand upon his brother of the brush; they then both whipped their horses and departed. This rencounter mortified Morland very sensibly; he declared that he knew nothing of the chimney-sweep, and that he was forced upon him by the impertinence of Hooper; but the artist's habits made the story be generally believed, and "Sweeps, your honour,” was a joke which he was often obliged to hear.

Raphael Smith, the engraver, had employed Morland for years on works from which he engraved, and by which he won large sums of money. He called one day with Bannister the comedian to look at a picture which was upon the easel. Smith was satisfied with the artist's progress, and said, "I shall now proceed on my morning ride." "Stay a moment," said Morland, laying down his brush, " and I will go with you." "Morland," answered the other, in an emphatic tone, which could not be mistaken, "I have an appointment with a gentleman, who is waiting for me." Such a sarcasm from such lips, from a Smith to a Morland, might have cured any Iman who was not incurable; it made but a momentary impression upon the mind of our painter.

who cursed the engraver, and returned to his palette.

His love of horses, once great, gradually subsided; he at length studiously refused any intercourse with the worthy fraternity of horse-dealers, not because he felt that they had cheated him as often as he risked making a bargain, but because he nad found another method of disposing of his pictures. He now retired to some secluded place, set up his easel, dashed off a few paintings, and intrusted them to the care and the conscience of a bosom crony, whose business it was to dispose of them in the most profitable market. The claim which this associate had upon his confidence was confirmed by many a deep and prolonged carousal, nor is there reason to believe that the man failed to do his best; he returned with the money; it was instantly melted into gin and brandy.

All his early pride of dress gradually vanished; his clothes were now mean, his looks squalid, and when he ventured into the streets of London, he was so haunted by creditors, real or imaginary, that he skulked rather than walked, and kept a look-out on suspicious alleys and corners of evil reputation. If he saw any one looking anxiously at him, which many must have done out of compassion for the wreck which folly had wrought with genius, he instantly imagined him a creditor, and fled like quicksilver, for he was in debt to so many that he dreaded duns in every street. Harassed by incessant apprehensions of arrest, he shifted from place to place; and before the close of his career, was acquainted with every spot of secrecy or refuge within the four counties which surround the metropolis. One day, wearied with perpetual changing of abode, he took his crony with him to make a regular inspection of the King's Bench Prison. They were conducted over that strange scene, which still remains exactly as it is described by Smollett,

and departed with a lively conviction that such quarters as Hatchway and Tom Pipes coveted so earnestly would be worse than any our painter had yet experienced. The squalors of the Bare, however, left no impression strong enough to alter his conduct.

On one occasion he hid himself in Hackney, where his anxious looks and secluded manner of life induced some of his charitable neighbours to believe him a maker of forged notes. The Directors of the Bank despatched two of their most dexterous emissaries to inquire, reconnoitre, search, and seize. These men arrived, and began to draw lines of circumvallation round the painter's retreat; he was not, however, to be surprised; mistaking those agents of evil mien for bailiffs, he escaped from behind as they approached in front, fled into Hoxton, and never halted till he had hid himself in London. Nothing was found to justify suspicion, and when Mrs. Morland, who was his companion in this retreat, told them who her husband was, and showed them some unfinished pictures, they made such a report at the Bank, that the Directors presented him with a couple of bank-notes of twenty pounds each, by way of compensation for the alarm they had given him.

The sad estate into which he had fallen made any story of his distress be believed, and before his death, as well as after, "anecdotes of Morland the rainter," were regularly manufactured for newsapers and magazines. "He was found," I copy these words from Fuseli's edition of Pilkington, "He was found at another time in a lodging in Somer's Town, in the following most extraordinary circumstances: his infant child, that had been dead nearly three weeks, lay in its coffin; in one corner of the room an ass and foal stood munching barley straw out of the cradle; a sow and pigs were solacing themselves in the recess of an old cupboard,