The days of Burton have passed, and the echoes of roof-splitting laughter he excited have died away; but while the remembrance of "lovely things" remains with us, those who were fortunate enough to have seen Mr. Taylor's play of "Helping Hands," as performed at Burton's Theatre in New York, will be sure never to forget it.
We should be glad, if space permitted, to speak of Mr. Taylor in the several branches of literature wherein he has become distinguished; but it is chiefly with him as a biographer, and principally with one biography, we are concerned here.
Six years ago, Leslie's "Biographical Recollections" were given to the world by the hand of the same editor. There are few books more delightful of this kind in our language; and no small share of the interest results from the conscientious work Mr. Taylor has put into the study of Mr. Leslie's pictures, and his recognition of him as distinctively a literary painter, possessing a kindly brotherhood to Washington Irving in the subtile humor he loved to depict.
We remember having the good fortune once to meet Mr. Taylor, while he was preparing this book, and being impressed with the idea that he had committed Mr. Leslie's paintings to memory, as one of the necessary preliminaries in order to do justice to his subject. He had that day returned from a pilgrimage to one of the pictures, and was able to inform the artists who were present with regard to the smallest accessory. We fancied, had painting, and not penning, been his forte, he could have reproduced the picture for us on the spot, could we, at the same time, have transformed the table-cloth into a canvas.
In the Preface to the Recollections of Leslie, we are told that the reason his autobiography ends abruptly was not because of Mr. Leslie's failing health, "but because all the time he could spare from painting was, during the last year of his life, occupied by him in writing the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, at which he worked hard even a month before his death." When the Leslie papers were put into Mr. Taylor's hands, this Life, then in a fragmentary condition, being hardly more than memoranda, for the most part, also came into his possession. And it having been his "lot," as he has elsewhere said, to have the materials for two artistic biographies already intrusted to his care, he must have accepted the third, thus silently bestowed, as the especial legacy of his friend.
Therefore, by education and by accident, (if we may choose to consider it such,) setting aside Mr. Taylor's natural ability for the labor, he found himself pre-eminently elected to complete and issue the "Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds." The request of Mr. Murray, the publisher, appears, however, to have spurred him to the actual acceptance of the work. Some idea of these volumes, with their varied interest of life and art, may be briefly conveyed by quoting from the Preface, where Mr. Taylor writes:—
"The life of a painter, more than most men, as a rule, derives its interest from his work and from the people he paints. When his sitters are the chief men and women of his time, for beauty, genius, rank, power, wit, goodness, or even fashion and folly, this interest is heightened. It culminates when the painter is the equal and honored associate of his sitters. All these conditions concur in the case of Reynolds. It is impossible to write a Life and Times of the painter without passing in review—hasty and brief as it must be—the great facts of politics, literature, and manners during his busy life, which touched, often very closely, the chief actors in a drama taking in the most stirring events of the last century, and containing the germs of many things that have materially operated to shape our arts, manners, and institutions.
"By the use of these materials, I have attempted to carry out Mr. Leslie's intention of presenting Sir Joshua in his true character, as the genial centre of a most various and brilliant society, as well as the transmitter of its chief figures to our time by his potent art."
It is only by turning over the pages of each chapter, and observing closely the brackets wherein Mr. Taylor's portion of the work is enclosed, that we discover how great his labor has been, and how well fulfilled. His interpolations are flung, like the Fribourg Bridge, fine and strong, welding together opposing points, and never inserted like a wedge. A happy instance of this appears in the first volume, where Mr. Taylor says, speaking of Johnson, after the death of his mother, "The regard of such men as Reynolds was henceforth the best comfort of that great, solitary heart; and the painter's purse and house and pen were alike at his friend's service." "For example," Leslie continues, "in this year Reynolds wrote three papers for the 'Idler.' 'I have heard Sir Joshua say,' observes Northcote, 'that Johnson required them from him on a sudden emergency, and on that account he sat up the whole night to complete them in time; and by it he was so much disordered, that it produced a vertigo in his head.'"
The story of Reynolds's youth is a happier one than is often recorded of young artists. His father was too wise and too kind to cross the natural proclivities of the boy, although he does appear to have wavered for a moment when Joshua declared he "had rather be an apothecary than an ordinary painter." He was, however, early apprenticed to Hudson, the first portrait-painter of his time in England. But hardly two years had elapsed before the master saw himself eclipsed, and the two separated without great waste of love on the part of Hudson. From that moment, Reynolds's career was decided. He put the mannerism of his former master away from his pictures when he distanced himself from his studio, and, going soon after to the Continent, devoted himself to the study of great works of art. With what vigor and faithfulness this labor was pursued, the Roman and Venetian note-books testify. "For the studies he made from Raphael," writes Leslie, "he paid dearly; for he caught so severe a cold in the chambers of the Vatican as to occasion a deafness which obliged him to use an ear-trumpet for the remainder of his life."