'You shouldn't have made that fellow holding up his hands to receive the bodies. You should have made him digging a hole for them. How awfully grand; with a pickaxe, digging, dump, dump, dump!'
'Yes,' Northcote answered; 'but how am I to paint the sound of dump, dump, dump?'
The Boydell pictures were for a long time very popular, and the engravings of them enjoyed a large sale.
Of course, Northcote despised Hogarth. Abuse of that painter seemed to be one of the duties of the British historical artist of that day. Yet he paid him homage; he painted a series of pictures, Hogarthian in subject, and proved to the satisfaction of everybody, one would think, the absolute superiority of Hogarth. Mr. Northcote's moral subjects, illustrative of vice and virtue, in the progress of two young women, are not to be mentioned in the same breath with the 'Mariage à la Mode.' Not merely were they deficient in expression—they were not equal in point of art-execution, though of course the more modern painter had planned to excel in both these qualities. But Northcote's portraits are really admirable—broad and vigorous—with much of Sir Joshua's charm of colour, if not his charm of manner exactly.
For fifty years he lived in Argyll Place, passing the greatest part of that time in his studio—a small room not more than nine feet by twelve, crowded with the conventional articles of vertu that were then considered to be the indispensable properties of a painter. His maiden sister—'Northcote in petticoats,' she was often called, she was so like him in face, figure, and manner—superintended his frugal household. Its economy was simple enough. The brother and sister were of one opinion. 'Half the world died of over-feeding,' they said. They went into an opposite extreme, and nearly starved themselves. When there was a cry in the land about scarcity of food, they did not heed the panic; they were accustomed to a minimum of sustenance, they could hardly be deprived of that. Fuseli, who sowed his satire broadcast, exclaimed one day: 'What! does Northcote keep a dog? What does he live upon? Why, he must eat his own fleas!' But the painter did not attempt to force his opinions upon others, so the kennel and the kitchen fared better than the parlour. The servants were indulgently treated, permitted to eat as they pleased, and die in their own fashion—of repletion or apoplexy, if it seemed good to them.
If he was cold and callous and cynical to the rest of the world, he was ever good and kind to the pinched elderly lady his sister. By his will he gave directions that everything in his house should remain undisturbed, that there should be no sale of his property in her lifetime. He was counselled by considerate friends to have all his pictures sold immediately after his funeral while his name was fresh in the memory of the public; it was urged that his estate would benefit very much by the adoption of such a course. 'Gude God, no!' the old man would cry; 'I haven't patience with ye! Puir thing! d'ye think she'll not be sufficiently sad when my coffin be borne away, and she be left desolate! Tearing my pictures from the walls, and ransacking every nook and corner, and packing up and carting away what's dearer to her than household gods, and all for filthy lucre's sake! No; let her enjoy the few years that will be spared to her; when she walks about the house let her feel it all her own, such as it be, and nothing missing but her brother. I'd rather my bones were torn from my grave, and scattered to help repair the roads, than that a single thing should be displaced here to give her pain. Ye'll drive me mad!'
One day there was a great crowd in Argyll Place. Not to see the painter, not even to see a royal carriage that had just drawn up at his door, nor a popular prince of the blood who occupied the carriage, but to catch a glimpse of one about whom the town was then quite mad—raving mad: a small good-looking schoolboy, a theatrical homunculus, the Infant Roscius, Master William Henry Betty. Of course rages and panics and manias seem to be very foolish things, contemplated by the cool grey light of the morning after. It seems rather incredible now, that crowds should have assembled round the theatre at one o'clock to see Master Betty play Barbarossa in the evening; that he should have played for twenty-eight nights at Drury Lane, and drawn £17,000 into the treasury of the theatre. He was simply a handsome boy of thirteen with a fine voice, deep for his age, and powerful but monotonous. Surely he was not very intellectual, though he did witch the town so marvellously. 'If they admire me so much, what would they say of Mr. Harley?' quoth the boy, simply. Mr. Harley being the head tragedian of the same strolling company—a large-calved, leather-lunged player, doubtless, who had awed provincial groundlings for many a long year. Yet the boy's performance of Douglas charmed John Home, the author of the tragedy. 'The first time I ever saw the part of Douglas played according to my ideas of the character!' he exclaimed, as he stood in the wings; but he was then seventy years of age. 'The little Apollo off the pedestal!' cried Humphreys, the artist. 'A beautiful effusion of natural sensibility,' said cold Northcote; 'and then that graceful play of the limbs in youth—what an advantage over every one else!' As the child grew, the charm vanished; the crowds that had applauded the boy fled from the man. Byron denounced him warmly. 'His figure is fat, his features flat, his voice unmanageable, his action ungraceful, and, as Diggory says (in the farce of All the World's a Stage), "I defy him to extort that d——d muffin face of his into madness!"' Happy Master Betty! Hapless Mister Betty!
Opie had painted the Infant as the shepherd so well known to nursery prodigies watching on the Grampian Hills the flocks of his father, 'a frugal swain, whose constant care,' etc. etc. His Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence, who was a patron of the stage—or the people on it, or some of them—brought the boy to Northcote, to be represented in a 'Vandyke costume retiring from the altar of Shakespeare,'—rather an unmeaning ceremonial. But the picture was a great success, and the engraving of it published and dedicated to the duke. He was then about forty—a hearty, bluff gentleman, supposed to be free and breezy in his manliness from his service at sea,—kindly and unaffected in manner, had not the slightest knowledge of art, but regarded Northcote as 'an honest, independent, little, old fellow,' seasoning that remark with an oath, after the quarter-deck manner of naval gentlemen of the period.
The prince sat in the studio while the artist drew the Infant. Northcote was not a man to wear a better coat upon his back for all that his back was going to be turned upon royalty. He still wore the ragged, patched dressing-gown he always worked in. The painting of Master Betty was amusing at first, but it seemed, in the end, to be but a prolonged and tedious business to the not artistic looker-on. He must divert himself somehow. Certainly Northcote's appearance was comical. Suddenly the painter felt a twitching at his collar. He turned, frowned angrily, but said nothing. The prince persevered. Presently he touched lightly the painter's rough white locks.
'Mr. Northcote, pray how long do you devote to the duties of the toilet?'