as a cannon-ball, and a look as crabbed as if he had just been fined a day's allowance of grog, drop even his mite into the woman's lap. The rewarding look with which her eyes followed the maimed veteran, as he hobbled away upon his wooden leg, smote me.

It would be a piece of tedious egotism to relate the conversation I held with this distressed creature, after I had dispensed my bounty to her. But the scene to which it led I will describe.

It was with some difficulty I prevailed upon her to disclose her abode, or rather, to consent that she should conduct me to it; and, notwithstanding the sharp rebuke I had already received, in proportion to her reluctance the feeling grew strong within me that I was still the dupe of imposture. At length she yielded, but with a mournful shake of the head, which might be interpreted, I thought, two ways; either that she was conscious she could not escape detection, or satisfied that I should find her tale of misery too true. She arose, and I followed her slow feeble steps till we arrived at street, leading into the New Road, near Pentonville.

She stopped at No. - in that street; and, looking at me as she knocked at the door, said faintly, "We live here, sir.'

I had hardly time to notice the apparent comfort and respectability of the outward appearance of the house, before the door was opened by a fine-looking lad, about thirteen, whose dress denoted that species of poverty which is the wreck of former competence. He was old enough to know what misery means beyond the mere endurance of its sufferings and privations; and his countenance, therefore, wore that melancholy expression which is stamped by the habitual presence of sad thoughts. Yet there was a sparkling gladness in his eye to welcome back his mother, mingled with a timid inquiring glance at the stranger who accompanied her.

No words passed between them, and I followed my conductress silently into the parlour. Here was my first evidence of the destitution which the paper she had displayed proclaimed. There was nothing but the bare walls; literally nothing else: not an article of furniture of any description.

"Take your sister, George," said the miserable mother, "and lay her-" tears choked her utterance. She might have added, " on the ground!" for, as I afterwards learned, bed there was none, nor chair, nor table, nor aught, save the floor, for its resting-place. The poor fellow took the infant, yet asleep, and while his own tears started at those of his mother, left the room.

I heard a heavy tread above, as of one pacing up and down with a hurried, impetuous step.

"It is my husband," said she, anticipating the question which my lcok, I suppose, betrayed was upon my lips.

"Your husband! What is he?"

"An artist."

"An artist!" I repeated, in a tone which I dare say expressed what I felt; for, judging from all that had occurred, I expected to find the lowest branch of the art of colouring, dignified with a name which it has grown into a fashion to apply to the most consummate masters of the pencil.

"Yes, Sir," she replied, with something of offended pride, "an artist; and such an enthusiast of his art, that it has turned his brain. But I will go to him, and see if he will admit you."

She quitted the apartment, and the next moment I heard a loud laughing, clapping of hands, and vehement talking. I could not distinguish what was said; and before I had time to consider how I should act in the presence of a mad painter, quick steps descending the stairs apprised me of a visit for which I was wholly unprepared. The door flew open, and in rushed the husband followed by his wife entreating him to be calm, and assuring him he was mistaken.

He made a sudden halt when he saw me, and with a wild, scrutinizing glare, surveyed me from head to foot. I was at once convinced of the disordered state of his mind, and wished our relative positions changed; I between him and the door, instead of his being between me and the only means of an escape, if it should be necessary, which the room presented, unless I made a precipitate retreat from the window into the area. He was tall, thin, pale, and haggard in appearance, with a beard that had not been shaved for a month; and had on a faded green great coat, one sleeve of which was half torn away, and the other hanging in tatters. In his left hand he held an ivory palette; his right grasped-not his pencil-but a large iron poker!

It does not require the experience of a lunatic asylum to know that insane persons are best managed by gentleness; and with a sort of instinctive consciousness of this, I saluted him very courteously, taking off my hat to render the homage which was due to the master of the house from a stranger. The effect of my politeness answered my most sanguine expectations. He returned my bow with a great deal of exuberant dignity; dropped his poker, which hitherto he had held as if prepared either to repel or commit an aggression, and used it as a walking-stick, while with a stately measured step he approached the farther corner of the room where I had planted myself, and where, at that moment, I should have been well pleased to find the wall opening behind me, for the convenience of retreating two steps to each one of his in advance.

"Ha! ha!" he exclaimed, when he was so close to me, that if I had not held my head as erect as a grenadier of the Guards, the bristles of his month's beard would have entered my own chin: "Ha! ha! do you think I would let them touch the Last Judgement ?" and he brandished his poker over his head: "No! the rascals! They took every thing else; and I stood by and laughed to see what trouble they were at for my convenience. What cared I for tables, chairs, beds? They were in my way. But when they would have laid hands upon the Last Judgement! Martha," he continued, turning to his wife, who stood trembling and dejected at his side; "What did I say to the fellow who looked like Michael Angelo, when he came into the room for the Last Judgement? I knocked him down, Sir," addressing me again, and elevating his poker-" A judgment upon him, ha ha! but not the last; for then I took him thus," seizing me by the collar, " and thrust him into the street, ha! ha ha!"

"You did perfectly right," said I, with as much composure as

could possibly assume in my very awkward situation, and devoutly hoping he would not mistake me for Michael Angelo coming for his Last Judgement.

66

Right!" he exclaimed.

"Had he been an R.A. or the President of the R.A. himself, I would have felled him to the ground like an ox, or any man who dared to remove that canvass from the easel, till I had painted in the nose of Alexander: he is the principal figure in the fore-ground. If you are an artist, I need not tell you that to paint the end of a nose well-true to nature-is the climax of perfection in a portrait. Sir Joshua could never do it; West failed in all his noses; Sir Thomas is the only man in England, except myself, who can really paint a nose. Look even at the noses of the Prophets and Sibyls of Michael Angelo, in the Sistine Chapel-they are lumps of putty, Sir, stuck on by a glazier. YOURS would be a very difficult nose to paint!" he added, fixing his eyes upon my nose with an earnest gaze of so equivocal a meaning, that I wished at the moment Nature had defrauded me of that prominent feature.

All this time he had never once shifted his position; neither could I mine. His wife continued to stand close to us, looking at me every now and then with an expression of countenance which silently, but intelligibly, conjured me not to cross him; while the son, with his infant sister in his arms, appeared at the door, surveying the scene in an attitude of intense curiosity, and deep affliction for the state of his wretched parent. If I had had leisure to think of any thing but the jeopardy in which I considered myself, I should certainly have doubted whether second thoughts had proved themselves best on this occasion.

At length he yielded to the persuasions of his wife, and consented that I should go up stairs and see the Last Judgement, after making me promise I would not approach nearer to it than he should point out. He led the way, shouldering his poker like a musket: the wife followed next, and I brought up the rear. When I entered the room I was amazed! It was stripped of every article of furniture; but in the centre, stretched upon the easel, stood a magnificent painting unfinished, as I saw at the first glance, (and in more respects than the nose of Alexander,) of the Last Judgement. The grace and expression, united with grandeur of form, in the principal figures; the variety of the subordinate parts; the effective grouping; the rich yet complete harmony of colour; and in some of the faces, the appalling passions that were pourtrayed, constituted altogether as fine a specimen of modern art as I had ever looked upon.

The burst of admiration which escaped from me was so sincere, so fervent, that it fell like an electrical shock upon the shattered nerves and overwrought brain of the unhappy artist. He burst into tears. With passionate sobs, with shrieks of alternate delight and sorrow, he uttered a thousand wild exclamations, half ludicrous, half heart-rending, as he now gloried in his work, now execrated the age in which he lived, insensible as it was to his merits, and now deplored that all his genius had not been able to feed his children!

"Ha! ha! Sir," he cried, (throwing away his poker, rubbing his hands, and springing like a tiger from me to the picture, and from

the picture back again to me, as he spoke,)—" Ha! ha! Sir! Talk of your Titians, your Caraccis, your Raffaelles, even the great Florentine himself, Michael Angelo! Oh, God! Had they given me bread the while, for me and mine, I would have shed a glory upon my country brighter than that which now blazes over Italy! Io sono pittore! Look here! observe this sweeping outline-and here, what anatomy how finely that muscle is displayed! how I laboured to produce that! I have worked while the world slept, and worshipped my art in the stillness of those hours when the fainting soul languished for repose! Ay, Sir-Martha can tell you-I lived but at my easel. Do you see the ghastly expression of that face? how beautifully it contrasts with the serene, seraphic, spiritual joy, that beams from the features of that lovely maiden! This head conceived, this hand executed it all—and yet look at me! I am mad-mad-mad !” pressing his clenched hands violently to his forehead; "for I have been left to dream of visions that are gone, and to feed upon myself, till now I sometimes seem to see my own heart's blood covering that canvass instead of the colours I laid on!"

He became more composed, after this ebullition of his feelings, and gathered himself into an attitude of earnest contemplation of the picture. I was myself gazing at it with increasing admiration, when he suddenly burst into a loud laugh.

"Ha! ha! ha! What would Michael Angelo say, if he saw that? By Jupiter! that old man on the right, whom I mean for a Cardinal, has too much of the sly, demure look of a Quaker. There, there, go, go! I must not be interrupted any longer; we want money; and if they would empty before me the coffers of the Bank of England, they should not have it till I have bestowed my last touches upon the nose of Alexander, and painted up the Cardinal's face to the true piety of a well-paid churchman. There, go, go!"

I obeyed, and leaving the maniac to his moody fancies, returned with his wife to the parlour, where I received from her all the particulars of her husband's calamitous history.

His name was and he had not yet attained his five-andthirtieth year. He was what is called a self-taught artist; that is, one who embodied the conceptions of genius, (which are from Heaven,) in the same way as those men did who had no masters to study, being themselves the great originals in their art, and the models, by universal consent, for those who came after them. Such men were self-taught, for where were they to find teachers? And such self-tuition, which is but another word for inspiration, is the only school wherein the rarer works of Nature can study. In this sense Demosthenes was a self-taught orator among the Greeks, and Cicero among the Romans; Homer was a self-taught poet; and Shakspeare, and Cervantes, Milton, and Moliere, were self-taught; if by the phrase we are to understand that which, if it be not selftaught, is incommunicable. But to return from this digression to my crazed, self-taught, artist.

His father was a wealthy merchant; and designing his only son for the church, his education had been completed at Cambridge. But he was born a painter; and renouncing, with the recklessness

and impetuosity of a youthful mind, goaded onwards by the fiery impulses of one predominant, one devouring passion, he renounced every thing for it. This was an offence not at first to be forgiven by a father who had as strong a passion of another kind; who would rather have seen his son's name enrolled among the Tillotsons, Sherlocks, Taylors, and Barrows, of the English hierarchy, than heard him hailed by the general voice as the Raffaelle or Titian of his country. But there was doubtless a pardon that might have been slowly won from the parental heart, had not every hold upon it been dissevered by a second offence, that of marrying a beautiful, virtuous, and amiable girl, who was as poor as poverty herself in all things else. Pride discarded him from his home, and pride kept him voluntarily a stranger to it ever after.

He had now to struggle with adversity under all its most trying afflictions. He could not stoop to make the noble art to which he had devoted himself a trading commodity among the shopkeepers of the Metropolis. He disdained to colour canvass for wages that would barely suffice to maintain him. He chose rather, (when the small fund was exhausted which his father placed at his disposal in renouncing him, and which had been husbanded most thriftily,) to depend for precarious subsistence upon slender loans solicited from former friends, or acquaintance, while finishing his first serious effort in historical composition. The subject was a fine one-Oliver Cromwell surveying the dead body of Charles I. the night after his execution.* It was exhibited. The best judges were struck with its grandeur and poetical conception as a whole, and with the felicitous power displayed in many of its details. It soon found a purchaser at the modest price demanded by the artist, who was thus enabled to discharge his obligations to his friends, and provide for immediate

wants.

In this way he continued to wrestle with his fate for several years, alternately a borrower and a payer, as his various pieces were bought. He buried himself meanwhile in solitude; for no where can a man live so solitary as in a crowded city, especially if he be poor. It is there only he may be one of thousands, without one of the thousands amid whom he moves knowing enough of him to call him by his name. His ambition was of the true quality; incapable of repose or satisfaction; discontented with all that it achieved; eager for all that its restless aspirings aimed at, and confident that all was within its reach. He denied himself rest, almost food; frequently sat at his easel eighteen or twenty hours together; and during that time contented himself with a few biscuits, or a little fruit, to rally his sinking energies. Then, fevered and exhausted, he would throw himself on his bed; not to sleep, but to dream and talk of the visions of his waking thoughts.

* "While the assassinates that crept up and down afraid of every man they met, pointed at as monsters in nature, finished not their treason when they had ended his martyrdom, one (O. C.) to feed his eyes with cruelty, and satisfy his solicitous ambition, curiously surveyed the murthered carcass, when it was brought in a coffin to Whitehall, and to assure himself the King was quite dead, with his fingers searched the wound whether the head were fully severed from the body or no."-Lloyd's Memoirs.