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choice picture, and most effective. The boots were beautifully represented, and shining black as jet, yet painted so truly according to nature, that no small picture could be exhibited in competition with it.

Sir William Beechey, on first beholding this cabinet picture, exclaimed, "It is a gem above all price, and should be seen alone, for nothing in art can withstand its miraculous vigour and stupendous force."

We have seen many of the studies sketched from the life by the hand of this extraordinary genius, every one of which may be pronounced worthy of the high reputation which he attained to in his art.

He delighted in examining the veteran characters which he met with amongst the old pensioners at the hospitals of Greenwich and Chelsea College: every trait of his pencil, even the slightest of his sketches, abound in sterling truth, character, and expression; and it may be justly averred that he never retrogaded in his graphic pursuits: all he achieved was excellent; he never deviated in his career towards the acquirement of fame.

We have lately seen a drawing by his inimitable hand. We believe the scene, which is a guard-room, has a group of the old Scotch Covenanters, some attired in such armour as the age or the occasion in haste could supply; and the characters such, and so obviously true and so real, that the imagination could appear to identify each one assembled by his clan, and by his individual name.

The variety of stature of the men which are collected in this mustersome tall, others short-the various proportions of their guns, their swords, and other miscellaneous weapons, none of which were made to exact measure, are, nevertheless, most fitting to the parties; and the piece forms together an historical knowledge of thinking truly that only Wilkie could have displayed.

Wilkie for some years had formed a little coterie of friends, with whom

he associated on a happy footing; amongst other worthies to whom he was much attached was Mr. Peter Coxe, brother of the Archdeacon of Wiltshire. Coxe was a constant morning visitor at Wilkie's studio, and being a poet he read his poem to the painter, as Wilkie asserted, at least a thousand times.

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"Wilkie," said Coxe, can make me idle when he is so disposed,-for he brings me my hat, and we ramble about for hours."

The poet always bore about him a large mass of his manuscript poems, with which, as Pope observed, “he could read you clean dead."

By way of one of the illustrations of this poem, entitled "The Social Day," Wilkie painted gratuitously a very beautiful small cabinet picture for Mr. Coxe. When the picture was completed, Coxe said to Wilkie, "I wish to take apartments for some ladies." This was in Phillimore Place, where the painter resided; when Mr. Coxe knocked at the house-door, and said to Wilkie, "Walk up and down the terrace until I come out."

Wilkie who was gentle, and certainly not impatient, did as he was bidden. It was twelve at noon, and he began his promenade, and continued so to do until half-past two, when he began to fancy that Coxe, who was apt to indulge in fits of absence, had forgotten him. He therefore went home; but not finding his friend arrived, he posted back again to the lodging-house, and to his surprise found the poet still there, and the poor lady of the place in a fearful state of apprehension, for he had pinned her in a corner, and was still engaged in reading his manuscripts ; and nothing could possess her but the belief that the reader was stark mad. It is not surprising that she should so think; for he was so wrapt in his enthusiasm on the subject, that he read onwards with such untiring vehemence, that he actually was used to pant and foam at the mouth.

THE JOURNAL OF AN AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY.

IN THREE PARTS.

PART II.

"I was chosen fellow of the college when I was one year bachelor of arts; before which time I had been so studious as to fill whole books with observations out of various authors, with some of my own which I made upon them. For I find one book begun in the year 1646, wherein I have noted many useful things, and rather more large in the year 1647, having the word æternitas at the top of many pages, by the thought of which I was quickened to spend ny time well. It is a great comfort to me now in my old age, to find that I was so diligent in my youth; for in those books I have noted how I spent my time."-BISHOP PATRICK'S Autobiography. Oxford Edition, p. 15.

"My method will vary with the subject. Throughout I shall give my opinion with becoming modesty, but with the courage of a man unwilling to betray the rights of reason."-GIBBON: Introduction to his Diary.

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'As drives the storm, at any door I knock,
And house with Montaigne now, and now with Locke."

August 20.-Looked at a little book with a very pleasing title, and intended to shew the obligations of literature to the mothers of England. Of Shenstone, the writer says that his "precocious fondness for reading was so great, that to satisfy his craving for a fresh supply of books, his mother often wrapped up a piece of wood in the shape of a book and put it under his pillow, to induce sleep for the night, and gain time to supply the little student's demands for the morrow." I do not remember this anecdote of Shenstone. Mrs. Halsted mentions among famous English women, Lucy, Duchess of Bedford; the Countess of Abingdon; Dryden's Eleonora; Katherine Phillips, the "matchless Orinda ;" Lady Winchelsea; the Duchess of Newcastle, whom she pronounces "the most astonishing person" that flourished during the Stuart dynasty; Elizabeth Burnett, wife of the Bishop of Salisbury; Lady Masham, the friend of Locke, and daughter of Cudworth; Lady Chudleigh; Lady Norton; and the beautiful Lady Grace Gethin, mentioned by Congreve. Cowley, in his ode on Orinda's poems, has exhausted the fertility of his invention :

"Thy numbers gentle, and thy fancies
high;

Those as thy forehead smooth, these
sparkling as thine eye."
When was a compliment turned with
a more courtly air?

POPE: Imitat. of Hor. Ep. 1.

I thought of Whitfield in the evening, while reading Crabbe's description of the Sectarian in The Borough :

"See yonder preacher to his people pass,
Borne up and swelled by Tabernacle gass."
Has the following story, told by
Walpole, ever been disproved? —

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"The apostle Whitfield is come to some shame. He went to Lady Huntingdon lately and asked for forty pounds for some distressed saint or other. said she had not so much money in the house, but would give it him the first time she had. He was very pressing, but in vain. At last he said. There's your watch and trinkets, you don't want such vanities,-I will have that.' would have put him off; but he persisting, she said, Well, if you must have it, you must.' About a fortnight afterwards, going to his house, and being carried to his wife's chamber, among the paraphernalia of the latter, the countess found her own offering. This has made a terrible schism. She tells the story herself."

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I have read the latest and fullest life of Lady Huntingdon, but do not remember any allusion to this anecdote, of which Cowper would have said :

"And Perjury stood up to swear all true."

Archbishop Herring, writing to Duncomb in 1756, calls Whitfield "Daniel Burgess Redivivus." August 22. source of excellence in modern poetry. A small particle of gold is gathered

*To the Earl of Stafford. July 5, 1761.

Amplification is the

out of some stream of thought-issuing from the gloom of elder day— and is then worked up with tasteful skill into a fancy-ornament. Moore is an accomplished master in the art; and, like all ladies' jewellers, he has obtained very high prices for his articles. For a small casket, well filled with imitation-emeralds and rubies, the wholesale dealers have given him sums varying from three to one thousand pounds. He is one of those

"Artists who richly chase their thoughts,"

whom Green mentions.

Sometimes

it is pleasing to compare the expanded gold with the pure particle.

Thomson, in his "Spring," describes with extraordinary beauty and force the courtship of birds :"And shiver every feather with desire." Nothing can be more exquisite; Moore had not forgotten the line in his courtship of angels. The first angel, in his well-known Adelphipanorama, commonly called the Loves of the Angels, beholds a maiden bathing in a lake-crystal of course-and immediately a glowing sensation thrills through his nervous system ::

"The tremble of my wings all o'er

(For through each plume I felt the thrill)

Startled her, as she reached the shore

Of that small lake, her mirror still."

How much more beautiful the natural and appropriate image of Thomson !

August 23.-Read the fourteenth sermon of Bishop Patrick, in the volume (fifteen sermons) published after his death. I was aware that Richardson's Pamela had been recommended from the pulpit, but I did not know, until to-day, that the Essays of Cowley had received an equal honour from so distinguished a scholar and so eloquent a preacher as the Bishop of Ely. The bishop is speaking of the emperors of the world who have found their power unable to furnish them with employment or with happiness. "One of them, (as a rare person of our nation hath expressed better than I can do) who styled himself lord and god of all the earth, could not tell

how to pass his day pleasantly without spending two or three hours in catching flies and killing them with his bodkin." The "rare person" is Cowley, to whose essays the bishop refers in the margin. The passage occurs in Cowley's Essay on Great ness. The following allusion, in the same essay, to contemporary manners is very pleasant:-"Is any thing more common than to see our ladies of quality wear such high shoes as they cannot walk in without one to lead them? and a gown as long again as their body, so that they cannot stir to the next room without a page or two to hold it up?" Cowley places the summit of worldly happiness in the possession of an annual income of five hundred pounds (in the seventeenth century no inconsiderable sum); with this, he said, a man could procure a convenient brick-house, with decent wainscot and pretty forest - work hangings, with flower and fruit gardens." Alas! that he should have been cut off just when he was attempting to fill up the outline

which he had drawn!

How characteristic is the following remark:-"There is, in truth, no rising or meridian of the sun, but only in respect to several places; there is no right or left, no upperhand in nature; every thing is little, and every thing is great, according as it is diversely compared. There may be some village in Scotland or Ireland where I might be a great man; and in that case I should be like Cæsar (you would wonder how I and Cæsar should be like one another in any thing), and choose rather to be the first man of the village than second at Rome." Most ingenious of poets and most delightful of prose-writers! you will always be first at Chertsey! nor, by those who reach the Temple of Fame, will you be found outside the door.

August 24.-Read Gilpin's Essay on Picturesque Beauty. The following remark, contained in a note at page 18, is neatly expressed, and might be printed as an ingenious commentary upon the well-known couplet of Pope, in which he tells us that true expression, like the sun, gilds every object without altering it:

"Language," says Gilpin, "like light, is a medium. In painting subjects of

amusement, indeed, language may gild somewhat more and colour with the dyes of fancy; but where information is of more importance than entertainment, though you cannot throw too strong a light, you should carefully avoid a coloured one. The style of some writers resembles a bright light placed between the eye and the thing to be looked at. The light shews itself and hides the object."

Green has four lines very prettily expressed upon the same taste, as displayed in criticism :

"A tawdry critic, who perceives
No grace which plain proportion gives;
And, more than lineaments divine,
Admires the gilding of the shrine."

A similar criticism will apply to art; the pencil is still more susceptible of these net-allurements of colour

than the pen. It was Mason who

said that

"Titian's colour looks like Virgil's art."

August 25.-Murphy, in his Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson (page 95), relates a dispute between Johnson and Dr. Rose of Chiswick respecting the merits of Scottish writers. The argument arose out of the approaching publication of Ferguson's Essay on Civil Society. Dr. Rose, at length, offered to name a writer whom Johnson would himself admit to be the best in the kingdom. “Who is that?" inquired the rival doctor. "The Earl of Bute," answered Rose," when he wrote an order for your pension." "There, sir," was the reply of Johnson, "you have me in the toil." I do not know whether Croker has noticed this anecdote, or whether it is related in Boswell, but it seems to me only a paraphrase of a well-known story which is told of Dryden, and which may be found in any life of that poet; the difference consisting merely in this -that the order given to Dryden was not for a pension, but for a sum of money.

August 26. The son of a Dissenter, and educated in his opinions, agreeable in manners, moral in life, witty in conversation, holding a situation in the Customhouse, and dying in Nag's Head Court, Gracechurch Street, at the age of forty-one :-such is the brief history of the gifted author of the Spleen, who was commended by Pope and praised by

Gray. He deserved their admiration. With all Prior's ease, he had a vein of fancy peculiarly his own. Beautiful gleams of poetry shoot across his coarse and fantastic webs of thought :

"And fancy's telescope applies

With tinctured glass to cheat his eyes." Although living in the bustle of London, Green appears to have indulged the common poetical longing for rural repose. He has painted a pretty cottage view :

"And may my humble dwelling stand
Upon some chosen spot of land;
A pond before, full to the brim,
Where cows may cool and geese may
swim ;

Behind a green, like velvet neat,
Soft to the eye and to the feet;
Where od'rous plants, in evening fair,
Breathe all around ambrosial air."

Poets usually introduce Beauty at the door of their cottage-homes; but Green appears to have built his fancy-villa only for a bachelor, for he had expressed an opinion that in Venturing on a wife,

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Men ran the greatest risk in life." In running through the very small volume that encloses the poetical remains of Green, a few passages irresistibly arrest the reader's attention. Take this reminiscence of Westminster Hall:

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with a passage which seems to point to these lines of Green. It deserves quotation for two reasons: the happiness of the expression and the humility of the sentiment :

"Remember Burns,' has been the watchword of my friends. I do remember Burns, but I am not Burns. I have neither his fire to fan nor to quench, nor his passions to control. What then is my merit, if I make a veaceful voyage on a smooth sea with no mutiny on board?"

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August 27.-Many ingenious things have been written and said of Ovid, but it was reserved for Selden to introduce him into the Ecclesiastical Courts. "Ovid," says that learned and witty writer in his Table Talk (41, edit. 1679), was not only a fine poet, but (as a man may speak) a great canon lawyer, as appears in his Fasti, where we have more of the festivals of the old Romans than any where else. "Tis pity the rest are lost." So it is. Huet has some interesting and ingenious remarks on the character of Ovid.* His Epistles he thought elegant, his Metamorphoses languid and inartificial. The Fasti he admired. In that poem may be found some very beautiful personifications, groups carved by the chisel of Phidias. How exquisitely simple and antique is the following allegory in the fifth book of the Fasti (v. 45); it relates to the union of Honour with Reverence :

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Et patres in honore pio matresque tuetur; İlla comes pueris virginibusque venit. Illa datos fasces commendat, eburque curule;

Illa coronalis alta triumphat equis." Keightley professes his inability to discover the source from which Övid obtained this fiction, which possesses, he thinks, a Roman air; and Gierig, a former editor of Ovid, confidently believes that he took the thought from an elder poet. Elton supposes the idea of the Fasti to have been suggested by a passage in one of the Elegies of Propertius. The remark of Addison upon Ovid gives a just

though brief estimate of his character:-"He employs his invention more than his judgment, and speaks all the ingenious things that can be said upon a subject, rather than those which are adapted to the character and circumstances of the speaker."

August 28.-Passed a quarter of an hour this evening with Crabbe at the "Smoking Club” in his Borough. What a picture he paints in these

verses

"When midnight past, the very candles

seem

Dying for air, and give a ghastly gleam.” And still later in the evening :

"When but a few are left, the house to tire,

And they half sleeping by the sleeping fire." Cowper did not produce a drowsier sketch in his famous couplet :"While conversation, an exhausted stock, Grows drowsy as the clicking of a clock."

August 29.-Every one has heard of Gray's celebrated wish, to lie upon a sofa and read "eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon!" It occurs in a letter to West, after some remarks upon Joseph Andrews. was rather surprised to find an Archbishop of York expressing a similar partiality for Marivaux. Dr. Herring, writing November 3, 1738, to William Duncombe, tells him, "I cannot help mentioning a French book to you which I brought in the coach with me, Le Paysan Parvenu. It is a book of gallantry, but very modest; but the things which entertained me were the justness of some of the characters in it, and the great penetration into human nature." Green of Ipswich, in his amusing diary, mentions the same novel of Marivaux with more caution and judgment. He admires its beautiful scene-painting, but censures very properly the moral spirit that animates it—a spirit rendered infinitely dangerous by its subtle and penetrating sweetness. The Archbishop overlooked the disposition of the heart, being charmed by the elegance of the countenance. He forgot that the fountain may be poisoned without losing its clearness: that some flowers, with the most delicate colours, exhale destructive perfumes.

See Huetiana, in the collection published at Amsterdam, 1790, t. huitième, 67.

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