tined, however, to find undisturbed repose. He perceived the health of his wife declining, and he perceived it with an aggravation of sorrow which must have struck deep into a mind possessing sensibility. "She was sinking under the effects which her late sufferings and exertions, in attending upon him, had entailed upon her." This was not, indeed, the fault of Cumberland, but surely it was his misfortune; and dear as must be the recollection of a wife, who sacrifices her own existence in discharging her duty to her husband in sickness and affliction, still, the remembrance that it was a sacrifice weighs heavily upon the heart, and embitters our sorrows with something like remorse.

Cumberland bears the most unequivocal testimony to the virtues and fidelity of his wife, and it is pleasing to contemplate a picture of conjugal harmony, of sincerity, love, and confidence, in marriage, which is so rarely to be found. Something, no doubt, may be attributed to that tenderness with which we instinctively mention the dead; but even with that deduction there remains little reason to doubt that he found a degree of connubial happiness of which he might justly boast.

The family which accompanied him to Tunbridge Wells were, besides his wife, his second daughter Sophia, his infant one Marianne, and his three surviving sons, Richard, Charles, and William. His eldest daughter had married Lord

Edward Bentinck, brother to the Duke of Portland; and his second son, George, had been killed at the siege of Charlestown, the very day after he had been appointed to the command of an armed vessel.

Shortly after his return from Spain, he published his "Anecdotes of Eminent Painters in Spain," in two small octavo volumes. This was a work of original research, and introduced to the lovers of the art, and to artists, the names and productions of men very little known beyond the limits of their own country. Many of the anecdotes are amusing and interesting. Of the accuracy of his notions, however, with respect to the art itself, I can say nothing, but what would expose my own ignorance; but I have heard an artist of some eminence acknowledge, the general taste and fidelity of Cumberland's opinions. To these anecdotes he afterwards added another publication, "An accurate and descriptive catalogue of the several paintings in the King of Spain's Palace at Madrid, with some account of the pictures in the BuenRetiro."

This catalogue was the first that had been made, and was now done by the permission of the king of Spain, at Cumberland's request, being transmitted to him after his return to England.

As if the malice of criticism, however, delighted to vex a man who was so sensible of its power, Cumberland had no sooner published these Anecdotes

than he was accused of having violently and unjustly attacked, in the second volume, the character of his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds. Such a charge, living, as he then was, in habits of close intimacy with Reynolds, must have come with aggravated force; and Cumberland is at some pains, in his Memoirs, to vindicate himself from its truth. The supposed injury was committed in that part of the second volume where he is speaking of Mengs, and as the passage is not long I will extract it.

Mengs loved the truth, but he did not always find it out; under all the disadvantages of a contracted education, and soured by the insupportable severity of his father's discipline, his habit became saturnine and morose, and his manners unsocial and inelegant: he had a great propensity for speaking what are called plain truths, but which oftentimes, in fact, are no truths at all. His biographer and editor Azara, has given us an instance of this sort, in a reply he made to Pope Clement XIV. His Holiness had asked Mengs's opinion of some pictures he had collected at Venice. They are good for nothing, said Mengs. How so? rejoined his Holiness, they have been highly commended-naming a certain painter as his authority for their merit. Most Holy Father, replied Mengs, we are both professors of the same art; he extols what he cannot equal, and I depreciate what I am sensible I can excel. N. y. yo somos dos profesores. El uno alaba lo que es supe

rior á su esfera; y el otro vitupera lo que le es superior. I should suspect that Clement thought very little the worse of his pictures, and not much the better of Mengs for his repartee. Whether Mengs really thought with contempt of art which was inferior to his own, I will not pretend to decide; but that he was apt to speak contemptuously of artists superior to himself, I am inclined to believe; Azara tells us, that he pronounced of the academical lectures of our Reynolds, that they were calculated to mislead young students into error, teaching nothing but those superficial principles which he plainly avers are all that the author himself knows of the art he professes. Del libro moderno del Sr. Raynolds, Ingles, decia que es una obra, que puede conducir los juvenes al error; posque se queda en los principios superficiales que conoce solamente a quel autor. Azara immediately proceeds to say that Mengs was of a temperament colerico y adusto, and that his bitter and satirical turn created him infinitos agraviados y quejosos. When his historian and friend says this there is no occasion for me to repeat the remark. If the genius of Mengs had been capable of producing a composition equal to that of the tragic and pathetic Ugolino, I am persuaded such a sentence as the above would never have passed his lips; but flattery made him vain, and sickness rendered him peevish; he found himself at Madrid, in a country without rivals, and because the arts had travelled out of

his sight, he was disposed to think they existed nowhere but on his own pallet. The time, perhaps, is at hand, when our virtuosi will extend their route to Spain, and of these some one will probably be found, who, regarding with just indignation, these dogmatical decrees of Mengs, will take in hand the examination of his paintings, which I have now enumerated; and we may then be told, with the authority of science, that his Nativity, though so splendidly encased, and covered with such care, that the very winds of Heaven are not permitted to visit its face too roughly, would have owed more to the chrystal than it does in some parts, at least, had it been less transparent than it is; that it discovers an abortive and puisny bambino, which seems copied from a bottle; that Mengs was an artist who had seen much, and invented little; that he dispenses neither life nor death to his figures, excites no terror, rouses no passions, and risques no flights; that by studying to avoid particular defects, he incurs general ones, and paints with tameness and servility: that the contracted scale and idea of a painter of miniatures, as which he was brought up, is to be traced in all or most of his compositions, in which a finished delicacy of pencil exhibits the Hand of the Artist, but gives no emanations of the Soul of the Master: if it is beauty, it does not warm ; if it is sorrow, it excites no pity. That when the Angel announces the salutation to Mary, it is a messenger that has neither used dis