self in the fountain-an image of idleness and vanity." The Narcissus was painted, thrown aside, and lost-the Mercury is a sweet and classic production--perhaps one of the happiest of the painter's works. The god stands on the seashore, with the shell of a tortoise in his hand, listening to the sound which one of its extended fibres has emitted to' the touch of his finger. The future instrument dawns upon his mind--and Cupid, inspired with the same thought, presents him with an additional string, which he has plucked from his bow.

The thoughts of Barry dwelt ever on magnificent undertakings, and he imagined that grandeur and sublimity resided only in scenes of vast extent. He believed too that the Reformed as well as the Romish Church required the aid of art to illustrate its tenets, and animate its devotees-a dream in which the painters of the British school have persisted for a century. He heard, therefore, with undissembled joy, of the proposal to embellish the cathedral of Saint Paul with paintings of a scriptural nature, corresponding in dimensions with its dome and its panels, and he hastened to offer his services, with the hope of seeing the splendour of the Sistine rivalled in London. He thus writes concerning it to the Duke of Richmond. "The Dean and Chapter have agreed to leave the ornamenting of St. Paul's to the Academy, and it now rests with us to give permission to such painters as we shall think qualified to execute historical pictures of a certain size, I beieve from fifteen to twenty feet high. We also intend to set up a monument there-Pope is mentioned -the sculptor is to be paid by subscription, and a benefit from the playhouse. I proposed this matter to the Academy about a year since, a little after my being admitted an associate, and I had long set my heart upon it, as the only means for establishing a solid manly taste for real art, in place of our contemptible passion for the daubing of inconsequenVOL. II.-H

tial things, portraits of dogs, landscapes, &c.--things which the mind, which is the soul of art, having no concern in them, have hitherto served to disgrace us over all Europe." It is in his own house that the Englishman has set up the images which he loves to worship. The annual multitudes of paintings, all of a social and domestic character, which the Academy exhibits, are to be viewed with respect, since they bear witness to the general cultivation of homebred happiness: but Barry regarded all such compositions as no better than unblushing indications of insular stupidity. He resolved to lend no countenance to this domestic heresy in art, and determined to endure every privation in the exaltation of his profession. "I have taken great pains," he said, "to fashion myself for this kind of Quixotism: tò this end I have contracted and simplified my cravings and wants, and brought them into a very narrow compass." There is no doubt but he would have enjoyed all the luxury of privation, had he painted a few twenty-feet square pictures for the cathedral of St. Paul's, since they were to be done at the proper cost, not of the church, but of the Academicians. The subject which Barry selected, was the Jews rejecting Christ when Pilate entreated his release he probably made no progress in the sketch, and allowed the picture to lie embodied in his imagination till the sanction of the hierarchy should let his pencil loose.

The obstinacy of the Bishop of London, to which we have already alluded, made all this enthusiasm vain; and great and stormy was Barry's indignation.

While the project concerning St. Paul's was yet in suspense, he found time to execute his Chiron and the Achilles, a work of classical beauty and simplicity--which was purchased by Mr. Palmer at the singular rate of twenty guineas per figure. This mechanical mode of calculation seems to have been the artist's own invention, for in a letter to the Duke of

Richmond, concerning a picture which his grace had commissioned, there occurs the following characteristic passage. "My finances are pretty low at present therefore, if your grace should think proper to send me any part of the price of the picture, it would come very opportunely. I count upon six figures in it, and I had twenty guineas a figure for the picture I sold to Mr. Palmer, of Chiron and Achilles." The answer of the nobleman is in keeping with Barry's letter. "If I recollect right," said his grace, "the picture of Stratonice has but four capital figures in it, the other two being only companions; however, I do not mean to value the picture by the number of figures. On the other side of this paper I send you a draft on my banker for a hundred guineas, which I should hope you will think a sufficient price for the picture; but if you do not, I will immediately send you another draft for twenty more."

When the Bishop of London at length rejected the offer of the Royal Academy, it occurred to the Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, that they might avail themselves of this spirit of liberality, and have their rooms at the Adelphi covered by the surplus talent of the land, free of all expense. The passions of the painters, like those of the poet, seemed raging like so many devils to get vent in historic composition, and Valentine Green, the Secretary of the Society, was authorised to open the doors of the great rooms of the Adelphi for their accommodation: but ere this happened the Academy had taken another view of the matter, and they refused the offer. Barry, whose hopes had been raised high, was deeply grieved at this second disappointment; he imagined that he saw in it the extinction of all his dreams, and that the grand historic style had bowed its supremacy for ever before that domestic idol, portraiture. Having failed in painting the nation into a love of the historic art, he resolved to make

a last effort, and, if possible, write them into it: -and hence his " 'Inquiry into the Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Progress of Art in England."

A work of this sort had been long in his fancy. It was suggested while he was at Rome by the ignorant taunts of foreigners, that the genius of the British isles was too cold for works of fine imagination. Talent had been set down in the strange theories of Montesquieu and Winkelmann as the product of latitude, and the ardent fancy and delicacy of feeling which went to the composition of noble works, were compared to vines, which, producing rich and luscious clusters in the sunny vales of France and Italy, yield only hard, sour, and starveling buds in the cold, moist climate of England. The Inquiry of Barry had a twofold purpose: the refutation of these visionaries, and a vindication of his own theory, that art, before it could be honourable to England, required to devote itself fully to historic composition.

His answer to Winkelmann was triumphant, if the victory which common sense obtains over absurdity can be called a triumph. He refused all help from scientific reasoning, and proved by the evidence of history, that whatever influence the sun might have on the fruits of the earth, the rise, the glory, and degradation of nations had come from moral causes, in which neither climate nor season had any share. In Greece the warmth of the sun was ever the same, and the recurrence of the seasons also; corn, wine, and oil, all excellent in their kinds, had been produced during all periods, and are now produced, yet the fine arts are extinguished, and national capacity gone. If Greece had her day of glory, the same had happened to modern Italyher long line of illustrious artists had come to an end; yet the land yielded as richly as ever its annual crop of fruit. Having crushed the principle on

which this exclusive system of genius is founded, he handled with indignant vigour the insulting infer ence that the capacity of England was unequal to high art. He claimed superiority for the British in works of mental grandeur and loftiness of imagination, and pointed out Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton, as abounding in the finest pictures, and in the noblest and loveliest images of beauty.

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Of a work which may be considered as the first literary production of the Royal Academy, the offspring of a mind full of knowledge, and animated by more than common enthusiasm, it may be proper to transcribe some specimens. "It is a misfortune," says Barry, never entirely to be retrieved, that painting was not suffered to grow up among us at the same time with poetry and the other arts and sciences, while the genius of the nation was yet forming its character in strength, beauty, and refinement: it would have received a strength and a polish, and it would, in its turn, have given to our poetry a greater perfection in one of its masterfeatures, in which, Milton and Spenser excepted, it is rather somewhat defective. But the nation is now formed, and perhaps more than formed, and there is cause to fear that it may be too late to expect the last degree of perfection in the arts, from what we are now likely to produce in an age when, perhaps, frothy affectations, and modish, corrupt, silly opinions, of foreign as well as of domestic growth, have but too generally taken place of that masculine vigour and purity of taste so necessary both for the artist and for his employer. Let us suppose ever so many fortunate circumstances to concur in leading an artist into such a tract of study, among old stones and old canvass, as that he may be able to assimilate the pure, rigid, beautiful, simple taste of the Greeks and the old Italians with his own substance and observations on nature; yet afterward, if he should unfortunately happen to find that the era of those