COPLEY’S PORTRAITS.
The fame of Copley as a portrait-painter is comparatively limited. I can speak (says Dr. Dibdin) but of four of his portraits from reminiscence; those of the late Earl Spencer, Lord Sidmouth, Lord Colchester, and the late Richard Heber, Esq.—the latter when a boy of eight years, in the dining-room at Hodnet Hall. These portraits, with the exception of the last, are all engraved. That of Earl Spencer, in his full robes as a Knight of the Garter, and in the prime of his manhood, now placed at the bottom of the great historical portrait gallery at Althorp, must have been a striking likeness; but, like almost all the portraits of the artist, it is too stiff and stately. The portrait of the young Heber has, I think, considerable merit on the score of art. There is a play of light and shadow, and the figure, with a fine flowing head of hair, mixes up well with its accessories. He is leaning on a cricket-bat, with a ball in one hand. The face is, to my eye, such as I could conceive the original to have been, when I first remember him a Bachelor of the Arts at Oxford, full, plump, and athletic. In short, as Dean Swift expresses it, “if you should look at him in his boyhood through the magnifying end of the glass, and in his manhood through the diminishing end, it would be impossible to spy any difference.” The contemplation of this portrait has at times produced mixed emotions of admiration, regard, and pity.