hair crossing her neck in front: in 97 she appears almost overpowered by the high fez-like white cap and pouter-pigeon dress of the period. Her brother, John Kemble, as Richard III., (Stewart, 82,) looks a villain indeed with his lowering brows and tossed dark hair: and Charles Kemble, 87, (Noseda,) is scarcely more pleasing, though appearing in his own character: Harlowe, 99, paints the Kemble family, small full-length figures, Mrs. Siddons as Queen Katherine in Henry VIII. Amelia Alderson, 88, (Opie,) authoress and Quaker, the wife of John Opie and early friend of Mrs. Fry, is a fair rather pretty woman, in a white dress, her lips apart. Richard Porson's dark face, 89, is bent in contemplation. And then comes a small collection of painters. Joseph Mallard Turner represents himself, 94, as a young man of most singular countenance, with blue eyes and flowing light hair: Phillips paints Blake, 112, the wonderful illustrator of the Book of Job, 'engraver, painter, and poet,' as the catalogue tells us, and 'distinguished by a grand wild visionary genius,' as an oldish man in brown coat and white waistcoat; looking up and away, otherwise his wild genius finding little outward expression. The spectator must now return to the Entrance Hall, which opens with Lord Tenterden, 119, and contains many interesting female portraits. Anna Seward, (Opie) 140, the handsome Lichfield authoress who figures so prominently in the memoirs of the last century, is here seated, (Opie) 140, in an open white dress, her powdered hair tossed about, her eyes sleepy, and complexion the fair complexion of the period. Hannah More, 146, (Pickersgill,) is a kindly old lady seated in an arm-chair, with some remains of keenness in the eyes, the face softened by her own gray hair: in 150 Opie paints her as a younger woman, her face plain and care-worn rather than thoughtful, her thick short hair gray or powdered: in 158 (Miss Reynolds) she is younger still, with a doubled plait of hair down her neck; but the picture is hung in so dark a corner, as for little more to be discernible of this friend of Johnson, and 'chaplain' of Mrs. Garrick's earlier widowed days at Hampton, writer of tragedies and tracts, and unwearied benefactor of the poor. Immediately below Pickersgill's portrait of Hannah More hangs Sarah Kirby, Mrs. Trimmer, a rosycheeked old woman, in short sleeves and white mob-cap, her white hair fluffed back, alert, almost quizzical, the bright brown eyes helping to make this untiring writer for the young the very picture of lively old age with all its faculties about it. How quaint the very titles of her works read now-Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature,' 'Guardian of Education,' &c. It seems a step into another world to meet with John Keats, (Hilton) 152, a large yet thin-faced young man, with large gray eyes and marked nose, the light reddish brown hair parted in the middle, leaning in a careless poetical attitude, an open book before him. His early death at Rome in 1820, and desire to be buried where daisies could grow upon his grave, are almost as well known as the famous opening to Endymion'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.' Shelley follows his fellow poet, 153, (Miss Curran,) a very young man, small-eyed and sad expressioned, but the painting is a poor one, from which it is perhaps hard to judge fairly of the outward appearance of this perverted child of genius; removed from Eton owing to eccentricity and insubordination, expelled from Oxford, divorced from his first wife, relieved of the guardianship of his own children by the Chancellor on account of his strange and unhappy opinions, finally drowned in the wreck of his own boat on his return from Leghorn to his then Italian home, that close stormy 8th of July, 1822-such is the sad epitome of his life's story: a fortnight later, on the discovery of his body, it was burnt, as had been his special desire, and the ashes interred in the Protestant cemetery at Rome. His second wife, Mary Godwin, we find by a painter named Rothwell some way further on, No. 271: she married Shelley when only eighteen, he but four-and-twenty, and the same year published the strange tale of 'Frankenstein.' She long survived him, dying in 1851. Here she appears as a fair, insipid, almost affected woman, with very thin lips, by no means the beauty one might have expected Shelley to choose, nor giving much outward token of the kindred intellect which perhaps, in this case, the rather attracted him: in 1839 she edited her late husband's poems, writing in the highest terms of his domestic graces, as well as poetical gifts. Hoppner, 148, gives us William Gifford, 'critic and satirist,' yet by birth the son of a Devonshire plumber and glazier, later a sailor-boy, then a shoe-maker, finally the first and greatest editor of the Quarterly, which he conducted from its commencement in 1809 till within two years of his death, in all fifteen years. Who killed John Keats?' asks Byron, to answer ""I," says, the Quarterly, “'T was one of my feats.” "Who shot the arrow?" But if there were then any doubt as to the authorship of the article, that was said to have helped to lay the sensitive but also consumptive young poet in the grave,-Gifford, at least, was the editor, and thus had once more found 'follies to purge' and 'backs to scourge,' as Byron himself had incited him to do some ten years earlier. Henry Kirke White, a small profile portrait, hangs just over the catalogue stall, and thus can scarcely be seen with comfort. Mr. Wilberforce helped the once Nottingham stocking-weaver to St. John's, Cambridge, where he died from the effects of over-study when only oneand-twenty: 'Oh what a noble heart was here undone, When Science self destroy'd her favourite son!' sings Byron of his humbly-born fellow poet in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; and later wrote of him, with genuine feeling and admiration, "I am sorry you don't like Harry White; with a great deal of cant, which in him was sincere, (indeed, it killed him, as you killed Joe Blackett,) certes there is poetry and genius. . . . . For my part, I should have been most proud of such an acquaintance: his very prejudices were respectable.' Pleasant-looking Dr. Burney, (Lawrence) 155, must complete the notices of the Entrance Hall, which leads us into the Inner Hall, where William Roscoe, the Liverpool banker, sits at full length in comfortable learned leisure in his library, a bust of Charles Fox shewing his political tendencies, his love of Italian literature less visible. Shute Barrington, 161, (Hoppner,) Bishop of Durham, wins attention from the remarkable, almost Luther-like outline of head, large grey eyes, and general appearance of clear healthy old age. Robert Blomfield, 168, (Hoppner,) who would have found a more fitting place with Keats and Shelley, here wears his own light brown hair around the smooth young face, which is not much like the countenance most familiar to us as that of the author of The Farmer's Boy;' whilst Joseph Lancaster, founder of The Lancastrian system of Mutual Instruction, though of a larger build, is somewhat like it, stolid and farmer-like in face and figure. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 175, (Hamilton,) is a ruddy old man, with a bald forehead, wearing a claret-coloured coat: a group of the Edgeworth family is to be found up-stairs, No. 842, drawn in crayon by Adam Buck, 1787, twelve small figures seated round a table, on which lies the roll, the contents of which the father is explaining to the party. The then wife, Elizabeth Sneyd, (Mr. Edgeworth was four times married,) has a babe upon her knee; Maria, the eldest daughter, aged one-andtwenty, sits opposite her father, in a large white hat with a blue ribbon. There is no separate portrait of this celebrated Irish novelist, to whose keen and lively portraitures of Irish society Sir Walter Scott tells us that we are in great measure indebted for the Waverley Novels. The whole picture is but fifteen and a half inches by ten and a half; thus few characteristics of any one of Buck's sitters can be traced in his little crayon group, which hangs with its back to the Horticultural Gardens, as if an addition to the original Exhibition. The Cambridge University Library lends Henry Martyn to the collection; the young, sad, whiskerless missionary, a palm tree behind, and Indian landscape around him. He truly must have found it sweet to think that he had toiled for other worlds than this, when he came to stretch him for the last in far-away Tokat, after the 'splendid failure' of his devotion of health and talents to Missionary life. As a 'splendid failure-but as an example, not a beacon-did one select University Preacher in his stern appeal to all to devote all their talents to God's service regardless whether their labours were outward fruit or no, sum up this gifted scholar's career but a few months ago in their common University. Wilberforce, the successful slave-emancipator, sits rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, quizzical, in an easy resting attitude in his crimson arm chair, (Richmond) 180. May we wish that we had been enabled to know Wilberforce as he really was from the artist alone, not also crosslegged, and lounging in his easy-chair, in his very monument? Although Dean Stanley seems to find some satisfaction in this philanthropist of the nineteenth century being even in the Abbey thus represented at. nineteenth-century ease. The first bay of the Eastern Gallery introduces us to Lord Raglan, (Pickersgill) 188, as Fitzroy Somerset, and a young man of thirty, with hooked nose, and light brown hair: let us hope that some five-andthirty years later he found it sweet to die even for an ungrateful country. Frederick Duke of York forms a homely natural picture, spite his splendid uniform, as this 'Soldier's Friend' and monarch's favourite son sits reading at his table, protected from vulgar outward gaze by a thick white window-blind. In 194, Wilkie has a far more intellectual subject, and one more artistically treated-Arthur Duke of Wellington, seated at a table writing by the light of a lamp, which throws but scanty lurid glimmers on the dim darkness surrounding the Duke. Edward Duke of Kent, with little likeness to the present royal family, save in eyes, is painted by Hoppner, 196. In 199, Lawrence gives us Wellington as the conventional Duke of middle life, with folded arms, and wearing the ribbon of the Garter. Lords Combermere, Seaton, Anglesea, and many another distinguished officer of the old wars, are to be found grouped around their chief in this first bay of the Eastern Gallery. In the second, Wilkie paints George IV. at heroic full-length, in Highland costume, when His Majesty was at least forty years too old for such treatment. Queen Caroline and the Princess Charlotte are also full-length figures, (Lawrence) 225; the Queen, in black, a red girdle round her very short waist, a wreath of holly leaves and berries in her yellow-brown hair; she stands tuning a harp; the little Princess, a fair pretty child of seven or eight, more pretty, less bonnie, than one expected to see her, in white frock and blue shoes, with much crossed blue sandals, holds a piece of music towards the luckless mother, who might perhaps have lived and died merely a clever, good-natured, if somewhat vulgar woman, now happily forgotten, had she not been chosen as the bride of a fastidious heir-apparent, induced to marry simply that he might be freed from debt. In the next bay the Princess Charlotte is represented, (Dawe) 231, as a young woman bearing some little resemblance to her present Majesty, but fresher complexioned, as well as of larger build. Spite of our present gradually shortening waists, this exceedingly short waist of scarcely two inches, still looks so ungainly, that gazing on this picture no one can judge fairly of the personal appearance of the young girl on whose life then hung so much. The dress is of darkish blue, and the skirt falls from but little below the arm-pits, unrelieved by fold or plait, a wreath of large white flowers crowning the short brown hair. Canning, already mentioned 52, re-appears 234, (Gérard,) and 237, (Lawrence,) the latter the more familiar portrait of the scholarly statesman; Gérard paints him old and bald, with iron-gray mutton-chop whiskers. Sir Humphrey Davy's pleasant sensible face greets us in 233. In 242 Lawrence has a very different subject in the well-known ‘Master Lambton,' the pretty sentimental boy, in crimson dress and open shirtcollar, playing perilously near the edge of a cliff. The fourth bay, Nos. 247-270, must be delightful to all lovers of the Waverley Novels; here is Sir Walter as a young man, by Saxon, 247; as an old man, his gray hair combed straight over his forehead, (Grant) 249; as middle-aged, by Raeburn, 252; smooth and fair is the well-known face, as given by Leslie in 263. Is it possible that he is here without a dog? We have made no note of such companionship; but in 247 he is holding a dog; in 249 are two stag-hounds; to his right, in 252, is one of the same faithful friends. In 257, Faed paints him in the midst of a circle of literary friends, Christopher North (Professor Wilson) at once recognizable, as the loosely-made, gray-eyed, large-collared, free and easy Scot, with the flowing gray hair, a few sandy locks left only in the whiskers, with whom Sir J. Gordon had made us familiar in 255. Lauder paints Scott's son-in-law, John Lockhart, in 253; but it is a disappointing likeness of the brilliant writer and editor. The dark hair and eyebrows scarcely suit the sunken mouth and oldish uncertain face. Campbell, 256 and 284, is dark, good-looking, and stiff, if not prim; 259 gives us Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd; 260, Bewick, once a worker in his father's Northumbrian coal-pit, whose wood-engravings in his Histories of British Birds and Quadrupeds are still delighted in by both lovers of wood-engraving and natural history: 269, Charles Matthews, the comedian, and nearly a hundred numbers later we meet with him again. Highgate traditions still preserve the story of the notice of so much reward to whomsoever would give information as to the late robbery of his fruit in Millfield Lane, wherewith he sought to preserve his fruit unharmed by convincing any intending thief that there could at least be nothing left worth stealing in his gardens. Mrs. Shelley is the opening portrait of the fifth bay: here are also many other literary celebrities of varying note. Hartley Coleridge, 272; Horace Smith, joint author, with his brother James, of 'The Rejected Address,' 274; in four small crayon profiles, Lamb, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, 275, by Hancock, Lamb's pleasant countenance bearing this trying test of real good looks the best; 282, Cary paints him and the sister for whom he sacrificed so much, together a homely pair, in a dark homely picture, all accessories of equal simplicity, and yet romance and tragedy lay deep in the history of both sister and brother; the former in a fit of insanity had killed her mother, in 1796; the brother devoted his whole life to tender care of her, and for her sake died unmarried nearly forty years later. The 'Essays by Elia,' of the one, and 'Mrs. Leicester's School,' by the other, are now scarcely so well known as their joint work, 'Tales from Shakspeare :' |