[228] General John Money (1752-1817) was one of the earliest of English aeronauts. It was in an ascent from Norwich, July 22, 1785, that he was carried out to sea, where he “remained for seven hours struggling with his fate” before he was rescued.—Philip Reinagle, R.A. (1749-1833), was an animal, landscape, and dead game painter. Examples of his landscape work are at South Kensington.
[229] The Charles Greville here referred to was an early patron of Lawrence at Oxford, when the artist was a mere boy; also of Romney, whose portrait of Wortley Montague, the eccentric pseudo-Turk, he both bought and copied.
[230] Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), who married Emma Hart, Nelson’s Lady Hamilton, was a keen archæologist, and made a magnificent collection of Greek vases, which he sold to the British Museum. He purchased the Barberini, or “Portland,” vase from Byres, the architect, and sold it for 1800 guineas to the Duchess of Portland, in the sale of whose property it was bought by the family in 1829 for £1029. On February 7, 1745, after its acquisition by the British Museum (Montagu House), it was wantonly broken in pieces by a visitor named William Lloyd, who was sentenced to a fine or imprisonment. The fine was paid anonymously.
[231] Smith’s little present to Sir George Beaumont is the more interesting to us, because of that painter’s well-known love of brown, and his dictum that “there ought to be at least one brown tree in every landscape.” Beaumont’s name is inseparably associated with the National Gallery, and also with Wordsworth’s noble poem on his picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, containing the lines—
“Ah! then if mine had been the painter’s hand
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream,—
I would have planted thee, thou hoary pile,
Amid a world how different from this!