greatest man) in the world: kings and nobles were common every-day fölks, 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, 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 profound mystic. This last is a character common to many other artists in our days-Loutherbourg, Cosway, Blake, Sharp, Varley, etc.-who seem to relieve the literalness of their professional studies by voluntary excursions into the regions of the preternatural, 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, anti

quarianism, and virtu, jumbled all together in the richest disorder, dusty, shadowy, obscure, with much left to the imagination (how different from the finical, polished, petty, modernised air of some Collections 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 toa lock of Eloisa's hair-the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckinghamthe first finished sketch of the JocundaTitian'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 for he was the person that performed

it was;

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