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and industrial empire in the world. It is an act of stupendous importance that they are about to execute. Be it for good or be it for evil, it can never be retraced. From the moment they have completed it, the class to which they belong is politically dead. The artisans to whom they transfer the supreme power over the vast and varied interests of this community may or may not tolerate that those who have summoned them to it shall continue to exercise a delegated influence; but the independent power which the educated classes, the aristocracy, the professional men, the merchants, the landowners, the manufacturers, have hitherto exerted, will be gone for ever. By unwearied canvassing or lavish expenditure they may beg or bribe back a semblance of it for a time; but even that shadow, so dearly purchased, of their former influence, they will retain on sufferance. They will hold all their dearest rights by favour. Their sole hope of escaping the whole burden of a taxation, artificially inflated to furnish employment for the working classtheir only chance of averting laws that will limit the free disposal of property, and will leave the employer helpless in the presence of those whom he employs-will lie in an unflagging and unfas tidious courtiership of the new masters they have installed. And when this fate has come upon them, they will receive scant compassion either from the judgment of history or the opinion of their contemporaries; for it will record a tale little creditable to their sagacity or their courage. It will relate that it was in obedience to no overwhelming necessity that they bowed their necks beneath this grievous yoke. It will tell how these destructive projects had been raised before, and condemned by opinion-how they were revived to gratify the vanity of a pedantic busybody, whose historic name had been used in former days by abler men for their own purposes-and how the traditions of a constitution, splendid with centuries of success and of glory, were heedlessly sacrificed by the credulity of partisans and by the apathy of a community rendered reckless by its own prosperity. It will be for the new Parliament, called to a discussion so strangely at variance with the purpose for which it was elected, to decide whether this reproach shall attach to it. The danger is great; the temper of the times does not rise to the height of this momentous controversy; and we can only hope that before the sacrifice is irrevocably made, the class that now holds political power may be roused to recognise in its true character the infatuation of the statesmen who ask them to give it up for ever.

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QUARTERLY REVIEW.

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ART. I.-Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds: with notices of some of his contemporaries. Commenced by Charles Robert Leslie, R.A.; continued and concluded by Tom Taylor. 2 volumes. With portraits and illustrations. London: 1865. HE first authentic life of Reynolds was published in a quarto

pamphlet in 1797, and was prefixed the next year to an octavo edition of his literary works. The brief narrative was by his friend and executor, Malone; who, notwithstanding his intimate knowledge of the man has only produced a dull and feeble sketch. Northcote next took the subject in hand. His life of Reynolds appeared in 1813, and a second and enlarged edition in 1819. I like it,' said Rogers the poet, it may be depended upon for facts; and of course Northcote was a very competent critic in painting.' He had lived in the house with Reynolds for five years as pupil or assistant, and continued to associate with him for sixteen years more. He had a minute acquaintance with the pictures of his master in every stage, and a thorough comprehension of their subtlest qualities. His lot was cast in the world of artists, and he knew the relation in which they stood to their President, and the opinions they entertained of him. Northcote's book is not unworthy of his opportunities. Though there is an occasional want of arrangement, and though the composition has none of the force and piquancy which distinguished his conversation, the particulars he relates are abundantly interesting, and fulfil the great end of all biography, that of conveying a complete idea of the hero of the tale.

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The volumes of Northcote were followed in 1829 by the account which Allan Cunningham inserted in his Lives of the Painters.' This work is written in close imitation of the Lives of the Poets.' What Reynolds said of slavish mimicry in painting is equally true in literature, the model may be excellent, but the copy will be ridiculous.' The dogmatic and sententious style of Johnson was the natural product of a robust mind, throwing out comments upon books and men in the same vigorous form in which they were conceived. Allan Cunningham exaggerated the magisterial tone of his original, and employed it to give an imposing air to commonplaces and sophisms. The consequence is that there is frequently a ludicrous contrast Vol. 119-No. 238.

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between the insignificance of his ideas, and the oracular mode in which they are delivered. Johnson, again, abounds in weighty antithesis, and his copyist emulates him in such sentences as this:-'He who has been praised by Burke, and who was loved by Johnson, has little chance of being forgotten.' Nobody could outdo Johnson in his praise of Reynolds, or Burke in his love for him, and to allot praise to Burke, and love to Johnson, when both characteristics were united in each, was to sacrifice accuracy to a false sparkle of words. Nor could there be a more inane and misplaced reflection than to say that Reynolds had little chance of being forgotten because he had been praised by Burke and loved by Johnson, when he had won a far loftier immortality by his own exquisite works,—works which have hardly an inferior rank in painting to the productions of Burke and Johnson in literature. The frequent faults of style, however, were the least defect in Allan Cunningham's narrative. He had a bitter antipathy to the refined, amiable, and upright Reynolds, and, under the influence of this feeling, the biographer has told the story of his life very unfairly, and has converted one whose reputation is almost spotless, into a mean, envious, designing character. Leslie resolved to redress the wrong. He had been the friend of many persons who were acquainted with Reynolds, he was familiar with the traditions which prevailed among artists, and everything he had heard or read' contradicted the degrading charges of Allan Cunningham. For several years Mr. Leslie wanted leisure to execute his project, and when, at last, he entered upon it in earnest, he was overtaken by death. The biography was left unfinished, and the manuscript was put into the hands of Mr. Taylor, that he might revise and complete it.

Mr. Leslie and his editor had very different schemes. The first projected a life of Reynolds; the second conceived that the account of the individual ought to be accompanied by a general history of the times. This appears to us to be a fundamental mistake. Sir Joshua Reynolds lived for his art, and a select circle of friends. It would be difficult to name an eminent man who was less mixed up with the multifarious pursuits of the big and busy world around him. The plan does injustice to Reynolds and to Leslie, as well as to the accomplished editor himself.

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*The very qualities,' wrote Burke to Malone, May 22, 1795, which made the society of our friend so pleasant to all who knew him, are the very things that make it difficult to write his life, or to draw his character. The former part is peculiarly difficult, as it had little connection with great public events, nor was it diversified with much change of fortune, or much private adventure-hardly, indeed, any adventure at all. All that I could say of him I have said already in that short sketch'which I printed after his death.'

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The central figure of the painter is smothered in the mass of incongruous accessories which were intended to adorn him, and the valuable narrative of Mr. Leslie is cut up into little fragments, which lose half their effect when separated by the discursive interpolations of his editor. To counterbalance the redundancies we have far more information regarding Reynolds and his pictures than has been got together before. Mr. Taylor writes admirably on his proper subject, and if he had concentrated upon it the time he has wasted on unprofitable episodes, he might have perfected the work. There is one characteristic which must strike everybody, the generous, genial spirit with which he treats both. persons and things.

The Rev. Samuel Reynolds, the father of Sir Joshua, was born on Jan. 31, 1681. In June, 1715, he became master of the grammar-school at Plympton, and there Joshua was born on July 16, 1723. He was the third son, and seventh child in a family of eleven. Five of the number died young. Samuel Reynolds was more remarkable for the range than for the depth of his attainments. 'He,' said Sir Joshua to Northcote, who would arrive at eminence in his profession, should confine his whole attention to that alone, and not do as many very sensible men have done, who spent their time in acquiring a smattering of every science, by which their powers became so much divided that they were not masters of any one.' Northcote replied, that is exactly my own father.' Reynolds rejoined- And it was mine also.' His want of profundity might have been no disadvantage in the elementary instruction of youth, but he was also remarkable for good temper, guilelessness, and absence of mind, and these were qualities which would be likely to render him the dupe of his boys. Whatever was the cause he was unsuccessful in his office, and in spite of his various knowledge and virtues, he was at last left with only a single pupil.

Allan Cunningham asserts, without authority, that Samuel Reynolds was an 'indolent man, who seems to have neglected, more than such a parent ought, the education of his son.' Northcote, whose means of information were abundant, declares, on the contrary, that he was very assiduous in cultiyating the minds of his children.' The statement is confirmed by the letters of Samuel Reynolds. I have ordered matters so,' he writes March 3, 1743, of his first-born, Humphrey, who was in the Royal Navy, 'that I believe there is no admiral's son better.put in hand for the sea than he is. He has, by my means, the whole foundation for the theory of navigation, so that there is nothing that he need take upon trust, nothing but that he may have demonstration for if he pleases,

it having been my way to fill up the intervals of his coming home by going on just where we left off.' The persistency of his father in tutoring him in mathematics every time he set foot on shore, is the strongest evidence of paternal diligence and zeal. Joshua was intended for a general practitioner in medicine, and his training was commenced with equal care. Before he was seventeen he had already spent a great deal of time and pains' on the study of medicine, under the direction of Samuel Reynolds, who was, in his own opinion, a proficient in the science. He thought of арprenticing his son to the Plympton apothecary, and said he should make no account of the qualification of the nominal master, since he himself should be the actual instructor. The salary of the worthy schoolmaster was only 120l. a year and a house, and as, with his large family and small income, he could not afford to send his boys to the University, he had evidently resolved to educate them with reference to their special callings, instead of devoting their entire youth to obtaining a critical acquaintance with the learned languages. He had not the less taken care to ground them in the classics. Sir Joshua was as well versed in Latin as the majority of gentlemen. He was at no loss to detect a wrong translation which Mason, a professed scholar, introduced into the version of Du Fresnoy's 'Art of Painting,' and Mr. Leslie remarks that Johnson not only submitted the epitaph on Goldsmith to the judgment of Reynolds, but, when the manuscript was mislaid, assumed that he could write down parts of the composition from memory. Johnson could not be deceived in the acquirements of a constant companion, and he was above the hypocrisy of pretending to give him credit for more knowledge than he possessed.

Joshua had been accustomed from childhood to make little sketches, and copy the poor engravings in Dryden's 'Plutarch,' and Jacob Cats' Book of Emblems.' He does not appear to have displayed at the outset any extraordinary skill. His most memorable feat was that he went through the Jesuits' Perspective' of his own accord at the age of eight. 'It happened,' he told Malone, 'to lie on the window-seat of his father's parlour, and he made himself so completely master of it, that he never afterwards had occasion to study any other treatise on that subject.' He lost no time in reducing the system to practice, and drew by it the Plympton school-house, which was open below, and rested upon columns at one side, and one end. Now this,' said Samuel Reynolds of his son's performance, 'exemplifies what the author of the "Perspective" asserts in his Preface, that by observing the rules laid down in his book, a man may do wonders;

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