of the men and women of his own generation, he was at the same time dreaming of the great imaginative art of Florence. When we have learned to love the work of a great man, we are curious to know what it was that he himself most deeply loved and rever enced, and in this sense Sir Joshua's passionate eulogy of Michael Angelo is deeply interesting to us. Nor was the special tendency of his ambition wholly without influence upon his own practice. I do not now speak of the deliberate attempts at ideal composition for which he occasionally deserted his work in portraiture. These experiments, indeed, in so far as they may be judged by the higher standard to which they affect to conform, are rather to be counted among the failures of his art. They serve for the most part only to mark the essential limitations of his genius, not to express its resources, and they prove to us that in the course which he had marked out for himself his instinct was just and true. It is in his practice as a portrait painter that the happy influence of his finely cultivated taste most conspicuously displays itself. There is in all his work a certain modesty of temper as of a mind ever deeply conscious of a style greater than his own. If he is more constantly fascinating as a painter than even the greatest of his contemporaries, it is because he had in him more of the spirit of the student. "I know no man," said Johnson, "who passed through life with more observation than Reynolds," and the remark applies as much to the things of art as to the facts of life itself. With Reynolds the assurance of the master never bordered on impertinence. He was searching always and to the end, and even those melancholy experiments with pigments and colours which have served to hasten the ruin of many of his pictures, are but the outward sign of a higher intellectual curiosity which is of the very essence of his genius. To the close of his long career his painting preserved the interesting characteristics that in the work of other men belong only to the season of youth and progress: he is little of a mannerist, because he has none of the settled confidence of style which begets mannerism with each new subject he is moved to new effort and experiment; and though the measure of his success is not always the same, even his failures are not the failures of audacity or self-assurance.

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It was not then without profit that Reynolds reverenced and studied the great masters of an earlier time. Though he possessed none of the gifts which allowed him

to enter into their ideal world, he caught something of their spirit, and his constant respect for their greater achievements served always to ennoble his own practice. Nor did this contact with the art of the past weaken or impede the exercise of his own individuality. There is a prevalent notion that great originality does not demand the support of learning, and it is doubtless true that the spectacle of brilliant genius emerging from a background of ignorance, has a vulgar glamour and attractiveness. But the

only kind of originality, worth the name, is that which eagerly appropriates all that can be learned, and still preserves its own identity. The sort of genius that cannot endure the test of study borders closely upon charlatanism, and upon this truth Reynolds himself was constantly insisting. "He appears

not to have had the least conception," he says, still speaking of Michael Angelo," that his art was to be acquired by any other means than great labour; and yet he, of all men that ever lived, might make the greatest pretensions to the efficacy of native genius and inspiration." And in the belief which he here expresses, we may find the secret of Reynolds's own success. That he, too, possesses his own share of native inspiration is shown clearly enough in the course of his practice as a painter. When we think of the art which he most loved, how modest by comparison seems the scope of his own achievement! If he had suffered himself to be led by his ambition, he would indeed have been the mere product of learning and pedantry, and his art would have gone the way of so many other experiments in the grand style, which found their grave in the eighteenth century. For a real revival of the imaginative art which had flowered in Italy the time was not ripe, nor were the men ready, and it was, therefore, with the native prudence of true genius that Reynolds, though he cherished, even to the last, the thought of Florence and its traditions, accepted for himself a humbler function, and was content to labour in another field. And so it happens that in his own portrait, painted for the Royal Academy, although he has introduced the bust of Michael Angelo to record his devotion to that master, the picture in itself reminds us, not of the art of Italy, but rather of the principles and style of the school of Rembrandt.

From the qualities of temperament that make themselves apparent in his work, we may partly understand how it was that Reynolds was so much beloved as a man. Even without the recorded opinion of his contemporaries, we should be prepared upon

inspires these designs of Reynolds-for in this respect no one of his contemporaries was in any sort his equal. To the portraiture of Gainsborough we may perhaps turn with greater confidence for an exact reflex of the social life of his time. His women have often, it may be allowed, a superior distinction and style. They own the external charm that belongs to the manners, the costume, and the character of their epoch, whereas in the art of Reynolds we are constantly tempted to forget differences of rank and station in the enjoyment of a deeper and broader humanity. No portrait painter before his time had taken so wide a range; he painted all classes, and all with equal sympathy, and this same quiet liberality of appreciation which animates his art entered in equal measure into his life, endearing him to men of varying intellectual gifts and of widely divergent character and occupation. The well-known sentence of Johnson's, that he was "the most invulnerable man he knew ; whom, if he should quarrel with him he should find the most difficulty how to abuse," implies in itself only a negative judgment, and might aptly fit a nature that was capable of inspiring no real affection. But Johnson found warmer terms in which to describe his friend. In the summer of 1764, when Reynolds had been ill, he addressed him in words that he would not have used to a man he did not love, though the form in which he expresses himself may seem to us now somewhat ponderously polite.

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Having had no particular account of your disorder," he writes, "I know not in what state it has left you. If the amusement of my company can exhilarate the languor of a slow recovery, I will not delay a day to come to you; for I know not how I can so effectually promote my own pleasure as by pleasing you, or my own interest by preserving you, in whom, if I should lose you, I should lose about the only man whom I call a friend." On another occasion, referring to his own melancholy, he lets fall an observation that throws a pleasant light upon character of the painter. "Some men," he says, "and very thinking men too, have not these vexing thoughts. Sir Joshua Reynolds is the same all the year round." Even the occasional differences between the two friends have a touch of kindliness; and once when Johnson's rudeness had called forth Reynolds's dignity, the former grew suddenly humble, and with as near an approach to a blush as Boswell could bring himself to record, said, "Nay, don't be angry, I did not mean to offend you." The last

vision we get of this happy friendship is Johnson's dying request that Reynolds would forgive him thirty pounds which he had borrowed of him, as he wished to leave the money to a poor family.

The faithful Boswell lived to witness and to describe the last illness of Sir Joshua, himself. The man who in his years of health and labour had been " the same all the year round" was not always proof against melancholy. "He broods," writes Boswell, "over the dismal apprehension of becoming quite blind. He has been kept so low as to diet that he is quite relaxed and desponding," and then he adds, "He who used to be looked upon as perhaps the most happy man in the world is now as I tell you." Within a few hours of his death, which took place shortly after this letter was written, Edmund Burke thus describes the character of his old friend-"His talents of every kind powerful from nature, and not meanly cultivated by letters, his social virtues in all the relations and all the habitudes of life, rendered him the centre of a very great and unparalleled variety of agreeable societies which will be dissipated by his death. He had too much merit not to excite some jealousy, too much innocence to provoke any enmity. The loss of no man of his time can be felt with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow. Hail and Farewell." And in this same memorandum Burke aptly illustrates the source of that superior power in the portraiture of Reynolds to which reference has already been made. "He communicated to that description of the art in which English artists are the most engaged, a variety, a fancy, and a dignity derived from the higher branches, which even those who professed them in a superior manner did not always preserve when they delineated individual nature. In painting portraits he appeared not to be raised upon that platform, but to descend to it from a higher sphere."

It is curious to reflect that a man who lived to win the esteem and respect of the greatest of his contemporaries was at one time destined to fill a very humble sphere in life. Yet so it was. In the year 1740 Joshua, as his father expresses it, was "drawing near to seventeen" and it was therefore urgently necessary that he should make choice of a career. The elder Reynolds was himself a clergyman and the head-master of the grammar-school at Plympton, but he seems also to have dabbled a little in medicine, and to this cause is doubtless to be ascribed the idea which he had of apprenticing his son to an apothecary. Joshua had already made some

boyish experiments in design, which had attracted the favourable notice of a local artist. His own inclinations were therefore, we may assume, pretty clearly established, yet he told his father at the time that "he would rather be an apothecary than an ordinary painter, but if he could be bound to an eminent master he should choose the

latter." The "eminent master made his appearance in the person of Thomas Hudson, a native of Devonshire, who since the retirement of his master, Jonathan Richardson, occupied the foremost place among the portrait painters of his time. Hudson has received less than justice at the hands of the biographers of Reynolds. He was an artist