A well-known portrait painter, and President of the Royal Academy. He drew good likenesses in pencil and ink at five years old, and received a prize from the Society of Arts at thirteen for a copy in chalk of Raphael’s Transfiguration. His portraits in the Waterloo Gallery at Windsor are very celebrated. He painted exquisite pictures of children.
GEORGE CRABBE.
Born 1754.—Died 1832.—George III.—George IV.
A poet, born at Aldborough, in Suffolk, who perhaps first opened men’s eyes in England to the poetry of common things. His tales in verse are admirable pictures of everyday life, full of pathos. Crabbe went to London to try to make his fortune by literature, but would have perished of want had it not been for Edmund Burke, who generously befriended him in every possible way.
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
Born 1771.—Died 1832.—George III.—George IV.—William IV.
One of the most extraordinary literary men on record. He was born in Edinburgh, and intended for the law, and practised for a short time in Edinburgh; but his literary genius asserted itself too strongly to allow of any other pursuit. His Border Minstrelsy was succeeded by longer poems—the Lay of the Last Minstrel, the Lady of the Lake, Lord of the Isles, Marmion, and others; and these again by a succession of novels, all differing in their rich abundance of character and incident, and all possessing a charm which few other works of fiction can even now present. He bought a property called Abbotsford, on the Tweed, and having fallen into difficulties through the failure of one of his publishers, he ruined his health by excessive work to pay his debts. Scott is often called, from the enchantment of his genius, “The Wizard of the North.”
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE,
Born 1759.—Died 1833.—George III.—George IV.—William IV.
Was a native of Hull. After many years’ active labour to obtain the emancipation of slaves in the English dependencies, in which his chief coadjutors were Clarkson, Granville Sharpe, and Lord Brougham, Wilberforce lived to see the Act of Emancipation passed under William IV.