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months, then ruined it for ever! With all his excellencies in this branch of the art, he was a great mannerist; but the worst of his pic tures have a value from the facility of execution, which excellence I shall again mention.

"His groupes of figures are for the most part very pleasing, though unnatural for a town-girl with her clothes in rags is not a ragged country girl. Notwithstanding this remark, there are numberless instances of his groupes at the door of a cottage, or by a fire in a wood, &c., that are so pleasing as to disarm criticism. He sometimes, like Murillo, gave interest to a single figure: his 'Shepherd's Boy,' 'Woodman,''Girl and Pigs,' are equal to the best pictures on such subjects. His Fighting Dogs,' Girl warming herself,' and some others, show his great powers in this style of painting. The very distinguished rank the Girl and Pigs' held at Mr Calonne's sale, in company with some of the best pictures of the best masters, will fully justify a commendation which might else seem extravagant.

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"If I were to rest his reputation on one point, it would be on his drawings. No man ever possessed methods so various in producing effect, and all excellent; his washy, patching style was here in its proper element. The subject which is scarce enough for a picture, is sufficient for a drawing; and the hasty, loose handling, which in painting is poor, is rich in a transparent work of bistre and Indian ink. Perhaps the quickest effects ever produced were in some of his drawings, and this leads me to take up again his facility of execution.

"Many of his pictures have no other merit than this facility; and yet, having it, are undoubtedly valuable. His drawings almost rest on this quality alone for their value; but possessing it in an eminent degree-and as no drawing can have any merit where it is wanting-his works, therefore, in this branch of the art, approach nearer to perfec tion than his paintings. If the term facility explain not itself instead of a definition, I will illustrate it. Should a performer of middling execution on the violin, contrive to get through his piece, the most that can be said is, that he has not failed in his attempt. Should Cramer perform the same music, it would be so much within his powers, that it would be executed with ease. Now, the superiority of pleasure which arises from the execution of a Cramer, is enjoyed from the facility of a Gainsborough. A poor piece performed by one, or a poor subject taken by the other, give more pleasure by the manner in which they are treated, than a good piece of music, and a sublime subject, in the hands of artists that have not the means by which effects are produced, in subjection to them. To a good painter or musician, this illustration was needless; and yet, by them only, perhaps, it will be felt and understood.

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By way of addition to this sketch of Gainsborough, let me mention a few miscellaneous particulars. He had no relish for historical painting; he never sold, but always gave away his drawings commonly to persons who were perfectly ignorant of their value.' He hated the harpsichord and the piano-forte. He disliked singing, particularly in parts. He detested reading; but was so like Sterne in his

'He presented twenty drawings to a lady, who pasted them to the wainscot of her dressing-room. Sometime after she left the house; the drawings, of course, became the temporary property of every tenant.

letters, that if it were not for an originality that could be copied from no one, it might be supposed that he formed his style upon a close imitation of that author. He had as much pleasure in looking at a violin as in hearing it. I have seen him for many minutes surveying in silence the perfections of an instrument, from the just proportion of the model and beauty of the workmanship. His conversation was sprightly, but licentious; his favourite subjects were music and painting, which he treated in a manner peculiarly his own. The common topics, or any of a superior cast, he thoroughly hated, and always interrupted by some stroke of wit or humour. The indiscriminate admirers of my late friend will consider this sketch of his character as far beneath his merit; but it must be remembered that my wish was not to make it perfect, but just. The same principle obliges me to add, that as to his common acquaintance he was sprightly and agreeable, so to his intimate friends he was sincere and honest, and that his heart was always alive to every feeling of honour and generosity. He died with this expression. We are all going to heaven, and Vandyke is of the party.'”

Percival Pott.

BORN A. D. 1713.—died a. D. 1788.

THIS very eminent surgeon was born in London. He early evinced a decided partiality for the medical profession, which his kind friend and patron, Dr Wilcox, bishop of Rochester, who had taken charge of his education after his father's death, enabled him to gratify. In 1729 he was apprenticed to Mr Nourse, one of the surgeons of St Bartholomew's hospital, under whose tuition he remained till 1736, when he commenced practice in London. He soon acquired a very large practice, and particular repute as a surgeon; and, in 1749, was elected one of the head-surgeons of St Bartholomew's.

In 1756 he published a treatise on Ruptures; and next year a paper on Congenital hernia, which led to a brief controversy with Dr William Hunter, who claimed priority of discovery. Pott acquitted himself in this dispute with great urbanity; while Hunter exhibited all his characteristic impatience of contradiction and impetuosity. In 1758 Pott published some valuable remarks on Fistula lacrymalis, and the best method of its cure. The suggestions contained in this pamphlet led to the discontinuance of Cheselden's mode of cure by actual cautery. In 1760 he published an admirable treatise on injuries of the head, which is still a first-rate authority in surgical science. In successive publications he favoured the medical world with a series of valuable observations on Hydrocele, Hernia of the Bladder, Cataract, Nasal Polypus, Cancer, Fractures and Dislocations. His entire works were pub lished collectively by himself in 4to; but the best edition is that in three volumes, 8vo, edited by his son-in-law, Sir James Earle.

In 1764 Mr Pott was elected a fellow of the Royal society; and in 1786 an honorary fellow of the Royal college of surgeons in Edinburgh. He died in 1788. It was Mr Pott's high honour to impart a degree of security of practice as well as humanity of treatment to British surgery, to which it had never before attained. In place of many of the old

established and barbarous methods by cautery, he substituted operations equally secure and far less torturing to the patient, founded on an accurate knowledge of the structure and relation of the various parts of the human body. Unlike some of his gifted contemporaries, he was open, bland, and courteous in his demeanour to all his professional brethren, even towards those from whose practice his own differed most widely. His writings are models of plain and perspicuous diction.

Thomas Warton.

BORN A. D. 1728.-died A. D. 1790.

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THOMAS WARTON, a name of some eminence in the literary history of the period now under consideration, was born at Basingstoke in Hampshire, of which place his father was vicar, in the year 1728. an early age he began to be distinguished as a poet; and, in his first and rudest efforts, discovered the same cast of genius and manner which characterizes all his serious compositions,—a splendid and vigorous fancy delighting to revel amid the chivalrous and romantic. biographer, Mr Mant, thinks that he has discovered the origin of our poet's peculiar fondness for castle-imagery in an incident of his early days, related by his brother, Dr Joseph Warton. When they were both boys, their father took them to see Windsor castle. The several objects which they saw on this occasion much engaged the attention and excited the admiration of Joseph, but Thomas preserved a profound silence, and spoke little on the way home. The father felt chagrined at this appearance of indifference or apathy on the part of Thomas, and remarked, "Thomas goes on, and takes no notice of any thing he has seen.' Joseph, remembering the remark in mature years, when his brother had risen to eminence as a poet, and had given so many indications of his exquisite sensibility to the impressions of such objects and associations as Windsor presents, observed, "I believe my brother was more struck with what he saw, and took more notice of every object than either of us.” An ingenious critic has observed, on this speculation of Warton's biographer, "that it is by no means invalidated by that appearance of mute insensibility with which the first impressions are said to have been received. The real sublimity of the object, and the many interesting associations which it is calculated to excite, may be very naturally supposed, at the first moment of observation, to have overpowered his youthful faculties: the ideas left in the memory, which were at first indistinct and distracting, grasped with difficulty, and incapable of being uttered, instead of fading away, may have gradually acquired additional vigour and a permanent influence and we may be tempted to believe, that the recollection of these early impressions may have contributed to rouse that fond enthusiasm with which, almost at the close of life, he sung the progressive glories of this venerable pile, the proud and stupendous monument of the rude magnificence of former ages."

From the period at which he first quitted his father's roof at the age

'Edinburgh Review, vol. ii. p. 253

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of sixteen, when he became a member of the university of Oxford, till his death, at the age of sixty-three, his life was entirely academical. He indeed held a parochial cure for some time, but his labours in this character were desultory, and to himself probably little agreeable. In 1745, he sent some articles to Dodsley's museum, but his first detached publication was 'The Pleasures of Melancholy.' In 1751 he succeeded to a fellowship, and in the same year he published his excellent satire, entitled, Newmarket.' In 1754 he published Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser,' his favourite poet. It produced an impression highly favourable to his critical talents, and led the way in a department of literature which has since been cultivated with much success amongst us. In 1757, on the resignation of Mr Hawkins, the Oxford professor of poetry, Mr Warton was elected to that office. A variety of minor publications fell from his pen during the interval which preceded the appearance of the first volume of his great work, 'The History of English Poetry,' in 1774. Among these were his life of Sir Thomas Pope, and a splendid edition of Theocritus.

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The design of a history of English poetry had been already entertained by Pope, Gray, and Mason, each of whom had made some preparations for the task. But they wanted the indefatigable perseverance which was necessary for the accomplishment of such a labour; and even Warton himself, with all his diligence and varied means and appliances' to boot, left the work in an unfinished state. To that portion which he has executed, forming three volumes in quarto, the praise of accuracy and research is unquestionably due; but it has been well observed that there is a certain lifeless massiveness' about it which renders the perusal of it an operose and dissatisfying labour to a mind of quick perception. It is in fact a great storehouse of learning, from which one may at all times procure what it would probably cost him not a little labour to obtain elsewhere, but the informing spirit of generalization is wanting to it. Still it is a highly respectable work of its kind, and forms the most solid basis of its author's reputation. During the publication of the successive volumes of this work, Mr Warton sent forth various minor literary productions. He took an active part in the Chattertonian controversy, and his Enquiry into the authenticity of the poem attributed to Thomas Rowley,' is a very able exposé of that ingenious forgery. His edition of the Juvenilia of Milton is a good specimen of that species of commentating, learned but minute to trifling, in which Warton excelled.

In 1782 it was his fortune, or we should better say, perhaps, his misfortune, to be nominated poet-laureate, at the express command of his majesty. He wore the courtly laurel with a better grace than either of his immediate predecessors, but his official odes' betray the sickliness of the atmosphere in which they were forced into unnatural life.

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Mr Warton enjoyed vigorous and uninterrupted health until a very short time preceding his death, which occurred on the 20th of May, 1790. His character was that of an amiable, accomplished, but retiring man, with sufficient genius and taste to redeem his erudition from the charge of pedantry, but destitute of the higher order of intellectual powers which alone could place him as a poet by the side of his favourites, Spenser and Milton. Mr Mant was informed that Dr Johnson had been pleased to say, on some unrecorded occasion, that Warton was

the only man of genius that he knew without a heart. It is doubtful whether Johnson ever did say this; but, if he did, the charge is not borne out by any thing we know of Warton's private life.

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Dr Richard Price.

BORN A. D. 1723.—died A. D. 1791.

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RICHARD PRICE, a political writer of respectable talent, was born in Glamorganshire in 1723, and was educated at Talgarth, in his native county, whence he removed to a dissenting academy near London. After having for some time resided at Stoke-Newington, he became pastor of an Arian congregation at Hackney, amongst whom he continued to officiate until his death. In the year 1758 he first appeared as an author in a treatise On the Foundation of Morals,' in which he opposed Hume's doctrines. This was followed, in 1767, by four dissertations of a religious character, which were favourably received, and, in conjunction with his former publication, procured for him the diploma of D.D. from the university of Glasgow. About the year 1770 he published an excellent treatise on Reversionary Payments,' a subject which his mathematical acquirements enabled him to discuss with much originality and ability. Soon afterwards, he appeared as a political arithmetician, in An Appeal to the Public on the subject of the National Debt. In 1775 Dr Price published Observations on Civil Liberty, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America.' This work secured for him the esteem of Franklin and the enmity of Burke. Soon after this, he engaged in an epistolary controversy with his friend Priestley, on the subjects of materialism and necessity. We next find him corresponding with the premier himself on the subject of finance. The establishment of the sinking fund was the result of the doctor's exposition of the marvellous augmentation of money by compound interest. Having shown that a penny, improved by annual compound interest at 5 per cent. would, in 1773 years, amount to an inconceivable sum, Dr Price went on to argue that "a state, if there is no misapplication of money, must necessarily make this improvement of any savings which can be applied to the payments of its debts. It need never, therefore, be under any difficulties; for, with the smallest savings, it may, in a little time, as its interest can require, pay off the largest debts." Extravagant and paradoxical as the whole reasoning is, it sufficed to influence the measures of Pitt, and for a time satisfied the nation itself. The breaking out of the French revolution was hailed by Dr Price as an omen of good to all Europe; and in a sermon On the Love of our Country,' which he published in 1789, he gave expression to his feelings regarding this event in language which drew upon him the indignation of Burke, and excited that eloquent man to the publication of his famous Reflections.' On the 14th of July, 1790, Dr Price closed his public life, by serving in the office of steward at a dinner in commemoration of the French revolution. After this he went into the country, but returned soon again to town in a declining state of health. friends urged him to reply to the Reflections,' but he felt his strength too far gone to attempt the task. In the following spring he was seized

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