Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Johnson.

WE once knew a lady who had sat at the footstool of the great Lexicographer, and listened to the floods of learning which he poured forth in the drawing-room of her mother. She was the youngest daughter of "the black-eyed Thrale," and the only one who clung to her mother during the storm of obloquy which fell upon the latter in consequence of her marriage with Piozzi. She lived at Brighton when we knew her, and her house was full of relics of those bygone days-dresses which our grandmothers had gloried in, but which were then only available for theatricals or a fancy-ball, books, pictures, knickknacks of all kinds, and she herself the most perfect and interesting curiosity of them all. Tall and stately, and a little formal, it was impossible to see her without feeling how well she must have looked in the patches and powder of her youthful days; it was impossible to hear her without confessing that her very speech smacked of Johnson in its rounded periods and monotonous delivery. She must have been very young, almost indeed a child, in the days when Johnson and his friends found a hospitable home at Streatham; but from the quiet corner to which her youth and her position as youngest daughter of the house consigned her, she had doubtless witnessed many of those scenes with which the pens of Boswell and of Burney have familiarised our minds. She had seen Johnson, just as we see him in our fancy still, with powderless wig and unbuckled shoes, the centre of the circle, pouring forth wit and sense-ay, and sometimes nonsense also-in "high Johnsonese;" pausing perhaps, ever and anon, in the midst of his oration-now to pet the young and timid of his admirers, now to trample (alas that it must be recorded!) with the foot of an elephant upon every thing that even looked like opposition to his sway. She had watched Boswell, busy and delighted, in his selfelected task of showman, seeking by all ways and means to make his lion roar, and never hesitating (to do him only justice) to sacrifice himself, by sayings silly even for a Boswell, in order to provoke him to exertion. Mrs. Montague, the blue-belles' queen, with

her "grand air and blaze of diamonds," she might have sometimes seen; as well as Mrs. Ord, her rival in the same shadowy dominion; and Miss Monckton, who set up on her own account as an eccentric and gifted woman. These ladies, however, she could have merely known as passing guests; while with "little Burney," on the contrary, the constant inmate of her mother's house, she must have been intimate as with a sister. Perhaps also, if she were in the secret of the "diary," she might have sometimes smiled with a little more than mere sisterly malice as she watched the "timid intelligence and drooping air" with which the fair Fanny received that homage in the drawing-room which was afterwards transferred with such unblushing fidelity to the pages of the journal, whence posterity has learned how Reynolds flirted with and Johnson praised her. Goldsmith, no doubt, she had sometimes seen in that bloom-coloured coat of which his friends tried with such cruel kindness to make him feel the folly; and Reynolds must inevitably have been associated in her childish mind with that trumpet which served him so well in a twofold capacity-by enabling him to enjoy the conversation of the truly wise, and to escape from that of the vain pretender; for

"When they talked of their Raphaels, Corregios, and stuff,
He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff.”

What a picture of head and heart Goldsmith has left us in these two lines! and happily the chief merit of the painting is its truth. Sir Joshua Reynolds was not merely honoured by all men as the chief painter of the day; he was loved by those who knew him best for the kind and equal temper which made him tender of his friends, and forbearing even to his very foes. Too kind-hearted willingly to give pain, he had no delight in witty speeches at the expense of others; and as he spared his friends, so they in turn seem unconsciously to have spared and respected him; for amid the biting retorts, the wicked jests, the horseplay raillery, which marked, and in some degree disfigured, the conversation of the best and wisest of that period, no anecdote, ridiculous or unkind, is told of Reynolds, and nothing of the sort is recorded as having been uttered by him.

A man is often less what nature than what circumstances have made him; and Reynolds was fortunate in both respects. Born of respectable if not rich parents,. he was never plunged by want into that lower depth of misery and woe from which men seldom emerge without some injury to temper and external bearing, even when the heart remains sound to its core.

His road to fame was made comparatively easy to him; the friends who started him for the race remained true till he reached

the goal; and he had no temptation, therefore, to speak unkindly of a world which had never been unkind or false to him. Race also had probably something to say to his gentleness of disposition; for if his sister Frances was a fidget, his father appears to have been as guileless and unsuspecting as a child. Absent too the good man must have been in no very common measure, if the story be true which is told of him, that riding one day in a pair of gambadoes (whatever that article of dress may be), he lost them, and never even knew that he had done so, until it was remarked by a chance acquaintance. A piece of unconsciousness which earned for him the sobriquet of 'Parson Adams' ever afterwards among his friends.

Sir Joshua Reynolds was one of the youngest of eleven children, and his father, a clergyman by profession, kept the grammar-school at Plympton. Here the future artist was born; and here, until a few years ago, might still be seen his first attempts at art, in the shape of rude charcoal-sketches on a white-washed wall. His father has been accused of having neglected his education; but it seems more probable that he had an idle pupil to begin with, and that Joshua found it an infinitely pleasanter amusement to pencil-over the blank margin of a Latin lesson than to make himself master of the lesson itself. There is still a tradition of a Latin exercise with a drawing in perspective on the back, and a note in his father's handwriting underneath it, stating it to have been done by Joshua out of pure idleness in school. It was an idleness, however, which bore splendid fruit. At eight years of age he had completed a successful study of perspective, and he commenced portrait-painting at twelve. The Rev. Thomas Smart was the subject of this first attempt. He was parson, butt, and tutor to young Dick Edgecumbe, a humourist even in his boyhood; and local tradition tells us that it was at his instigation Reynolds perpetrated the portrait. It was painted from a sketch made surreptitiously at the church at Maker, where Smart officiated as clergyman; and the two boys ran off triumphantly with their treasure to the boat-house on Cremyll beach, where Reynolds finished-up the portrait. He must have been rather puzzled for materials, for it is painted with common shipwright paint, on a piece of canvas torn from an old boat-sail. It is still in existence, and though of course very rough, is not (a friendly critic says) without a certain broad cleverness of character and design. Four years more, however, were suffered to elapse, and the profession of the young artist was still undecided. It seems to have been a choice for a time between painting and physic. The old schoolmaster was a dabbler himself in the healing art, and Joshua appears to have had no disinclination to it either. His very love of art may perhaps have made him nice in his ambition,

for he told his father that if he could not be bound to an eminent master, with a fair chance of reaching eminence himself, he would rather be an apothecary. Such a high tone of thought, joined as it was to genius and perseverance, was certain to succeed. A print which he saw, taken from one of Hudson's paintings, decided him at last; and he thought himself, and was thought by all his friends, the most fortunate of youths when that very mediocre personage consented to receive him as a pupil. His father speaks of it as of a very miracle of good luck, and adds, with a simplicity which Parson Adams could have equalled but not surpassed, that even Mr. Treby (the then great man of Plympton) might have envied such a position for one of his sons, if he had had enough of them to make him seek professions for them. Joshua went to London full of enthusiasm for his new master, and in all his boy's letters to his father he shows himself as anxious for Hudson's fame as if it had been his own. "On Thursday next Sir Robert Walpole sits for his picture," he writes; "master says he has had a great longing to draw his picture, because so many have been drawn and none are like." And proud and exultant the boy appears, when in another letter he is able to announce that the picture has succeeded, and that Sir Robert "acknowledges no other likeness to be his, but this." Shortly after writing this, he met with another and more unexpected delight. He had been sent by Hudson to purchase pictures, and was close to the auctioneer when he perceived a bustle near the door, and "Mr. Pope, Mr. Pope!" ran in an electric whisper round the room. The crowd fell back to let him pass, and the hands of all were held out to greet the old poet as he bowed his way up the room. Reynolds was not in the first row; but, eager and enthusiastic, he contrived to pass his arm through the crowd before him; and the poet who had sung the Belindas of a bygone age shook hands unconsciously with the painter who was to immortalise their successors upon canvas.

Fortunately for Reynolds, a disagreement between him and Hudson terminated their engagement at the close of two years. In that time he had learned all that Hudson had it in his power to teach him, and a longer course of such tuition would probably have left him a mere copyist of his master's tame and most inefficient manner. He returned to his father's house at Plympton, and painted most of the notabilities of his native town. In 1744, however, he was again in London, and had made it up with his old master; for it was Hudson who introduced him to a club (probably old Slaughter's), which he tells us was composed of all the most celebrated painters of the period. No man in the eighteenth century, however, was supposed to have completed his education, whether as an artist or a gentleman,

The

before he had completed what was popularly designated as the "grand tour." Through the kindness of Commodore Keppel, who gave him a free passage in the Centurion, Reynolds was enabled to pay this tax to public opinion in a cheap and pleasant manner. In his case, however, the "grand tour" was no mere tax or sham; and to the hours which he spent in the cold chambers of the Vatican, he attributed the cold which terminated so sadly for him in the almost total loss of hearing. Art was at a low ebb in those days in Italy, though people in England seem hardly to have realised the fact; for the magic of what had been still shed a sort of glamour over that which was. Men talked of the "Italian touch" as if it were a something to be imbibed by merely breathing the air of that bright land; and they fancied that because Italy could boast of her dead masters, her living artists must be great likewise. Reynolds, luckily for himself, was of a different opinion, and steadily declined all Lord Edgecumbe's entreaties that he would put himself under the guidance of Pompeo Battoni, the then great man of the Italian school. young artist had already served his apprenticeship to a commonplace English master; and declining all further study of the kind, he wisely chose Michael Angelo and Raphael for his only masters. After two years spent conscientiously in the study of his art, he returned to England, remaining for some time in Devonshire before he returned to London. The year in which he settled there was a dull one in the annals of the town. Politics were at so low an ebb that, as a witty woman said, they took rank after the "two young ladies who had been married, and the two young ladies who had been hanged." Faro and hazard were the fashionable games at White's. George Selwyn was the reigning wit; and the beautiful Gunning sisters were the reigning toasts, being in fact the identical young ladies who had achieved greatness by marriage. Among literary men Johnson had already tided over the first great difficulties of his career, and was hard at work upon his Dictionary. Burke, a much younger man, was reading at the Middle Temple. Goldsmith, ever luckless, had been sent in disgrace by his friends to study medicine in the capital of the North. Garrick was in the zenith of his fame as an actor; and Richardson, as a novelist, was on the pinnacle of his.

With none of these men was Reynolds at that time acquainted; nor does he seem to have become known to any of them until after he had left Saint Martin's Lane, and settled in Newport Street with his sister. "Dictionary Johnson," as the great Doctor was irreverently styled in those days, he met for the first time at the house of the Miss Cotterels', who lived opposite him in Newport