tact of the first order, and his sense of propriety prevailing in all things. As he had all these elements of art under controul, he used them with a master mind; with an ease in which labour was never visible, but all seemed of as natural growth as a daisy to the fallow-field. Nor was the propriety which he observed in all things the least wonderful of his qualities; he never committed folly in colours. Discretion was his controlling duty in all things; no one ever overdoes in his canvas any act he has to perform; all is done with ease and grace; his laugh is not loud, but the whole man laughs inwardly, and the same spirit of subdued enjoyment runs through all his compositions. For his command over human character we have only to look at his pictures; there we have it in single figures, in groups and in crowds. Sometimes the heads are created to suit the sentiment in request, sometimes modified only from nature with a part of the original adopted; and now and then, as in the case of The Maid of Saragossa and General Palafox, the scene is wrought out with no change but that which the action requires. He is no dealer in odd heads for oddity's sake, no more than he is of extravagant and outrageous postures. He knew that violent action distorted the human body; and while it hurt its natural beauty abated the feeling of ease with which almost all deeds fit for art should be done.

In dramatic skill he has been compared to Hogarth, who mingles caricature with his composition. This Wilkie never did: all is simple, clear, and unembarrassed. He has been, and with more propriety, com

pared to Raphael; not in subject, for the Italian handles the loftiest of all themes, and Wilkie frequently the humblest; but for the vivid truth of delineation, and the judgment with which he brings his characters into action, uniting them all in the task of making out and composing his story. The Village Politicians, The Blind Fiddler, The Rent Day, The Maid of Saragossa, and The Columbus, may be instanced as pictures which tell their stories as plain as with a tongue, and may be said to be represented on the stage in perfection whenever they are placed before us. In one thing these compositions have the advantage over literature: their language requires no translation ; they are addressed to all nations, kindreds, and tongues, and also that they require only to be seen to be understood; the eye takes all in at a glance; to read is but the work of a moment.

The colouring of Wilkie is very various, for he had to seek his way to what was bright and lasting, through perplexing theories, and amid the thick darkness which still involves the mystery of colours. For a while, when he was yet unknown, he was an admirer of his countryman Carse, and, deluded by his brilliancy, imitated it with a skill which is observed in most of his Edinburgh pictures: he next mixed his palette to the theory of a man who had written a book on the subject, and his success is supposed to have lessened the lustre of The Blind Fiddler. From this he turned to the more natural colouring of the Dutch school, as in The Village Festival, and Teniers and Ostade were his favourites. He borrowed small Ostades and kept them

beside him; and hesitated not, when he found his pictures at houses to which his merit brought him invitations, to stay and ponder over them, nor leave them till he filled his mind with what was before him. He next became a follower of Correggio and Rembrandt, and drank in their peculiarities as parched ground swallows up rain. He was somewhat touched with the splendour of Titian; and when he visited Spain he contended that Velasquez was the wisest of all great colourists; and, without exactly imitating him, mixed his palette under his influence. Out of all these masters he compounded a style of colouring which, for brilliancy and beauty, has not been excelled, and which promises to be permanent. The streakiness which I have heard objected to by some, and which is observable in his fine portrait of Lady Lyndhurst, subsides by distance; and in harmonious arrangement of colours, and luminous brilliancy of effect, he outshines all his contemporaries.

As a portrait painter Wilkie had great but unequal powers. I have heard some of his brethren, whose talents have been confined to that line, refuse to regard him as a portrait painter at all, and say that Wilkie admitted that he was not a popular one. But though Wilkie in humility admitted that he failed to please, and was not popular in that line, we are not prepared in the presence of such portraits as those of Lady Lyndhurst, the Duke of York, Queen Adelaide, The Duke of Sussex, Lord Kellie, Sir James M'Grigor, and Sir Peter Laurie, to say that he was less than a portrait painter of a high order. Had he not been a great painter of better things, many of his portraits

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would have been thought exquisite. That of the Duke of Sussex is a light to the palace; the likeness is excellent, the drawing good, and the colouring such as throws all neighbouring pictures into the shade; while that of Sir James M'Grigor, with the same fine drawing, and a similar brilliancy, has something of the land of the mountain and the flood in the air, which marks it for the north. The portrait of Queen Adelaide is particularly happy, not only for that unaffected lady-born air, but for the fine tone of colour which pervades the whole performance.

Many portraits which he admitted into his pictures are as true as they are beautiful. Though purposely made loutish, that of himself in Alfred in the Neatherd's Cottage, and those of his sister and his mother in Duncan Gray, are, I reckon, perfect. The drawing of his cousin, Mr. Young, in a Dutch costume, though purposely grotesque, is exceedingly like; nor am I disinclined to admit the likeness of his younger brother Thomas in the act of reading a book among his ablest portraits. But The Village Politicians, The Blind Fiddler, The Rent Day, The Reading of the Will, The Waterloo Gazette, The John Knox, The Maid of Saragossa, The Josephine, and The Columbus, will always stand between his portraits and public admiration, as they stand before all other works of art in the British School.

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APPENDIX A.

ADDRESS OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY

THOMAS WILKIE, ESQ., THE BROTHER, AND MISS HELEN WILKIE, THE SISTER OF THE LATE SIR DAVID WILKIE, R.A.

THE President and Council of the Royal Academy, although reluctant to obtrude on sorrows too recent and severe to admit of present alleviation, yet cannot resist the anxious desire they feel respectfully to manifest to the family of the late Sir David Wilkie how deeply they sympathise in the loss they have sustained by the lamentable and untimely death of that great painter. Connected with him for many years socially and professionally, as an important member of their body, the Academy are fully sensible how much they have been indebted to his valuable services as a man and an artist: they largely participate, therefore, in the grief and regret which have been so generally excited by an event that has deprived the arts and his country of one of their most distinguished

ornaments.

The President and Council are well aware that time alone can assuage the sufferings of affection under such a bereavement; but they sincerely hope that when calmer feelings shall succeed to more acute emotion, the relatives and friends of this eminent man will derive much consolation from the reflection that, although he has been unhappily cut off in the full vigour of his powers, he has lived long enough for his fame; that his works are known and admired wherever the arts are appreciated; and that he has achieved a celebrity unsurpassed in modern times.

MARTIN ARCHER SHEE, President.
JOHN DEERING.

GEORGE JONES.

E. LANDSEER.

RICHARD COOK.

DANIEL MACLISE.

WILLIAM FREDERICK WITHERINGTON.

SOLOMON ALEXANDER HART.

HENRY PERRONET BRIGGS.

HENRY HOWARD, Secretary.