Compared to either of these artists, Mr. West (the late Presi dent of the Royal Academy) was a thoroughly mechanical and common-place person-a man "of no mark or likelihood." He too was small, thin, but with regular well-formed features, and a precise, sedate, self-satisfied air. This, in part, arose from the conviction in his own mind that he was the greatest painter (and consequently the greatest man) in the world; kings and nobles were common every-day folks, while there was but one West in the many-peopled globe. If there was any one individual with whom he was inclined to share the palm of undivided superiority, it was with Bonaparte. When Mr. West had painted a picture, he thought it was perfect. He had no idea of any thing in the art but rules, and these he exactly conformed to; so that, according to his theory, what he did was quite right. He conceived of painting as a mechanical or scientific process, and had no more doubt of a face or a group in one of his high ideal compositions being what it ought to be, than a carpenter has that he has drawn a line straight with a ruler and a piece of chalk, or than a mathematician has that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right ones.

When Mr. West walked through his Gallery, the result of fifty years' labour, he saw nothing, either on the right or the left, to be added or taken away. The account he gave of his own pictures, which might seem like ostentation or rhodomontade, had a sincere and infantine simplicity in it. When some one spoke of his St. Paul shaking off the serpent from his arm (at Greenwich Hospital, I believe,) he said, "A little burst of genius, sir!" West was one of those happy mortals who had not an idea of any thing beyond himself or his own actual powers and knowledge. The whole art with him consisted in measuring the distance from the foot to the knee, in counting the number of muscles in the calf of the leg, in dividing his subject into three groups, in lifting up the eyebrows to express pity or wonder, and in contracting them to express anger or contempt. Looking at a picture of Rubens's, which he had in his possession, he said, with great indifference, "What a pity that this man wanted expression !” This natural self-complacency might be strengthened by collateral circumstances of birth and religion. West, as a native of America,

might be supposed to own no superior in the commonwealth of art: as a Quaker, he smiled with sectarian self-sufficiency at the objections that were made to his theory or practice in painting. He lived long in the firm persuasion of being one of the elect among the sons of Fame, and went to his final rest in the arms of Immortality! Happy error! Enviable old man!

Flaxman is another living and eminent artist, who is distinguished by success in his profession and by a prolonged and active old age. He is diminutive in person, like the others. I know little of him, but that he is an elegant sculptor, and a pro. found mystic. This last is a character common to many other artists in our days-Loutherbourg, Cosway, Blake, Sharp, Var. ley, &c.—who seem to relieve the literalness of their professional studies by voluntary excursions into the regions of the preterna. tural, pass their time between sleeping and waking, and whose ideas are like a stormy night, with the clouds driven rapidly across, and the blue sky and stars gleaming between!

Cosway is the last of these I shall mention. At that name I pause, and must be excused if I consecrate to him a frail memorial in my careless manner; for he was Fancy's child. What a fairy palace was his of specimens of art, antiquarianism, and vertu, jumbled all together in the richest disorder, dusty, shadowy, obscure, with much left to the imagination (how different from the finical, polished, petty, modernized air of some Collec tions we have seen!) and with copies of the Old Masters, cracked and damaged, which he touched and retouched with his own hand, and yet swore they were the genuine, the pure originals. All other collectors are fools to him: they go about with painful anxiety to find out the realities:-he said he had them-and in a moment made them of the breath of his nostrils and of the fumes of a lively imagination. His was the crucifix that Abelard prayed to a lock of Eloisa's hair-the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckingham-the first finished sketch of the Jocunda-Titian's large colossal profile of Peter Aretine—a mummy of an Egyptian king-a feather of a phoenix-a piece of Noah's Ark. Were the articles authentic? What matter? --his faith in them was true. He was gifted with a second-sight in such matters: he believed whatever was incredible. Fancy

bore sway in him; and so vivid were his impressions, that they included the substances of things in them. The agreeable and the true with him were one. He believed in Swedenborgianism -he believed in animal magnetism-he had conversed with more than one person of the Trinity-he could talk with his lady at Mantua through some fine vehicle of sense, as we speak to a servant down-stairs through a conduit-pipe. Richard Cosway was not the man to flinch from an ideal proposition. Once, at

an Academy dinner, when some question was made whether the story of Lambert's Leap was true, he started up, and said it was; for he was the person that performed it :-he once assured me that the knee-pan of King James I., in the ceiling at Whitehall, was nine feet across (he had measured it in concert with Mr. Cipriani, who was repairing the figures)—he could read in the Book of the Revelations without spectacles, and foretold the return of Bonaparte from Elba-and from St. Helena! His wife, the most ladylike of Englishwomen, being asked in Paris what sort of a man her husband was, made answer-" Toujours riant, toujours gai." This was his character. He must have been of French extraction. His soul appeared to possess the life of a bird; and such was the jauntiness of his air and manner, that to see him sit to have his half-boots laced on, you would fancy (by the help of a figure) that, instead of a little withered elderly gentleman, it was Venus attired by the Graces. His miniatures and whole-length drawings were not merely fashionable-they were fashion itself. His imitations of Michael Angelo were not the thing. When more than ninety, he retired from his profession, and used to hold up the palsied hand that had painted lords and ladies for upwards of sixty years, and smile, with unabated good-humour, at the vanity of human wishes. Take him with all his faults and follies, we scarce "shall look upon his like again!"

Why should such characters ever die? It seems hard upon them and us? Care fixes no sting in their hearts, and their persons "present no mark to the foe-man.” Death in them seizes upon living shadows. They scarce consume vital air: their gross functions have been long at an end--they live but to paint, to talk or think. Is it that the vice of age, the miser's fault, gnaws them? Many of them are not afraid of death, but

of coming to want; and having begun in poverty, are haunted with the idea that they shall end in it, and so are willing to dieto save charges. Otherwise, they might linger on forever, and defy augury!"

ESSAY XV.

On Egotism.

Ir is mentioned in the Life of Salvator Rosa, that on the occasion of an altar-piece of his being exhibited at Rome, in the triumph of the moment, he compared himself to Michael Angelo, and spoke against Raphael, calling him hard, dry, &c. Both these were fatal symptoms for the ultimate success of the work: the picture was in fact afterwards severely censured, so as to cause him much uneasiness; and he passed a great part of his life in quarrelling with the world for admiring his landscapes, which were truly excellent, and for not admiring his historical pieces, which were full of defects. Salvator wanted self-knowledge, and that respect for others which is both a cause and consequence of it. Like many more, he mistook the violent and irritable workings of self-will (in a wrong direction) for the impulse of genius, and his insensibility to the vast superiority of others for a proof of his equality with them.

In the first place, nothing augurs worse for any one's pretensions to the highest rank of excellence than his making free with those of others. He who boldly and unreservedly places himself on a level with the mighty dead, shows a want of sentiment-the only thing that can ensure immortality to his own works. When we forestal the judgment of posterity, it is because we are not confident of it. A mind that brings all others into a line with its own naked or assumed merits, that sees all objects in the foreground as it were, that does not regard the lofty monuments of genius through the atmosphere of fame, is coarse, crude, and repulsive as a picture without aerial perspective. Time, like distance, spreads a haze and a glory round all things. Not to perceive this, is to want a sense, is to be without imagination. Yet there are those who strut in their own self-opinion, and deck