Northcote—‘You do not know till you try. There is not so much difference as you imagine. Portrait often runs into history, and history into portrait, without our knowing it. Expression is common to both, and that is the chief difficulty. The greatest history-painters have always been able portrait-painters. How should a man paint a thing in motion, if he cannot paint it still? But the great point is to catch the prevailing look and character: if you are master of this, you can make almost what use of it you please. If a portrait has force, it will do for history; and if history is well painted, it will do for portrait. This is what gave dignity to Sir Joshua: his portraits had always that determined air and character that you know what to think of them as if you had seen them engaged in the most decided action. So Fuseli said of Titian’s picture of Paul III. and his two nephews, “That is true history!” Many of the groups in the Vatican, by Raphael, are only collections of fine portraits. That is why West, Barry, and others pretended to despise portrait, because they could not do it, and it would only expose their want of truth and nature. No! if you can give the look, you need not fear painting history. Yet how difficult that is, and on what slight causes it depends! It is not enough that it is seen, unless it is at the same time felt. How odd it seems, that often while you are looking at a face, and though you perceive no difference in the features, yet you find they have undergone a total alteration of expression! What a fine hand then is required to trace what the eye can scarcely be said to distinguish! So I used to contend against Sir Joshua that Raphael had triumphed over this difficulty in the Miracle of Bolsena, where he has given the internal blush of the unbelieving priest at seeing the wafer turned into blood—the colour to be sure assists, but the look of stupefaction and shame is also there in the most marked degree. Sir Joshua said it was my fancy, but I am as convinced of it as I am of my existence; and the proof is that otherwise he has done nothing. There is no story without it; but he has trusted to the expression to tell the story, instead of leaving the expression to be made out from the story. I have often observed the same thing in myself, when I have blamed any one as mildly as I could, not using any violence of language, nor indeed intending to hurt; and I have afterwards wondered at the effect; my sister has said, “You should have seen your look,” but I did not know of it myself.—I said, ‘If you had, it would have been less felt by others.’ An instance of this made me laugh not long ago. I was offended at a waiter for very ill behaviour at an inn at Calais; and while he was out of the room, I was putting on as angry a look as I could, but I found this sort of previous rehearsal to no purpose. The instant he returned into the room, I gave him a look that I felt made it unnecessary to tell him what I thought.’—‘To be sure, he would see it immediately.’—‘And don’t you think, Sir,’ I said, ‘that this explains the difficulty of fine acting, and the difference between good acting and bad—that is, between face-making or mouthing and genuine passion? To give the last, an actor must possess the highest truth of imagination, and must undergo an entire revolution of feeling. Is it wonderful that so many prefer an artificial to a natural actor, the mask to the man, the pompous pretension to the simple expression? Not at all; the wonder rather is that people in general judge so right as they do, when they have such doubtful grounds to go upon; and they would not, but they trust less to rules or reasoning than to their feelings.’
Northcote—‘You must come to that at last. The common sense of mankind (whether a good or a bad one) is the best criterion you have to appeal to. You necessarily impose upon yourself in judging of your own works. Whenever I am trying at an expression, I hang up the picture in the room and ask people what it means, and if they guess right, I think I have succeeded. You yourself see the thing as you wish it, or according to what you have been endeavouring to make it. When I was doing the figures of Argyll in prison and of his enemy who comes and finds him asleep, I had a great difficulty to encounter in conveying the expression of the last—indeed I did it from myself—I wanted to give a look of mingled remorse and admiration; and when I found that others saw this look in the sketch I had made, I left off. By going on, I might lose it again. There is a point of felicity which, whether you fall short of or have gone beyond it, can only be determined by the effect on the unprejudiced observer. You cannot be always with your picture to explain it to others: it must be left to speak for itself. Those who stand before their pictures and make fine speeches about them, do themselves a world of harm: a painter should cut out his tongue, if he wishes to succeed. His language addresses itself not to the ear, but the eye. He should stick to that as much as possible. Sometimes you hit off an effect without knowing it. Indeed the happiest results are frequently the most unconscious. Boaden was here the other day. You don’t remember Henderson, I suppose?’—‘No.’—‘He says his reading was the most perfect he ever knew. He thought himself a pretty good reader and a tolerable mimic; that he succeeded tolerably well in imitating Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, and others, but that there was something in Henderson’s reading so superior to all the rest, that he never could come any thing near it. I told him, You don’t know that: if you were to hear him now, you might think him even worse than your own imitation of him. We deceive ourselves as much with respect to the excellences of others as we do with respect to our own, by dwelling on a favourite idea. In order to judge, you should ask some one else who remembered him. I spoke to him about Kemble, whose life he has been lately writing. I said, when he sat to me for the Richard III. meeting the children, he lent me no assistance whatever in the expression I wished to give, but remained quite immoveable, as if he were sitting for an ordinary portrait. Boaden said, This was his way: he never put himself to any exertion, except in his professional character. If any one wanted to know his idea of a part or of a particular passage, his reply always was, “You must come and see me do it.”’
Northcote then spoke of the boy, as he always calls him (Master Betty). He asked if I had ever seen him act, and I said, Yes, and was one of his admirers. He answered, ‘Oh! yes, it was such a beautiful effusion of natural sensibility; and then that graceful play of the limbs in youth gave such an advantage over every one about him. Humphreys (the artist) said, “He had never seen the little Apollo off the pedestal before.” You see the same thing in the boys at Westminster-School. But no one was equal to him.’ Mr. Northcote alluded with pleasure to his unaffected manners when a boy, and mentioned as an instance of his simplicity, his saying one day, ‘If they admire me so much, what would they say to Mr. Harley?’ (a tragedian in the same strolling company with himself.) We then spoke of his acting since he was grown up. Northcote said, ‘He went to see him one night with Fuseli, in Alexander the Great, and that he observed coming out, they could get nobody to do it better.’—‘Nor so well,’ said Fuseli. A question being put, ‘Why then could he not succeed at present?’—‘Because,’ said Northcote, ‘the world will never admire twice. The first surprise was excited by his being a boy; and when that was over, nothing could bring them back again to the same point, not though he had turned out a second Roscius. They had taken a surfeit of their idol, and wanted something new. Nothing he could do could astonish them so much the second time, as the youthful prodigy had done the first time; and therefore he must always appear as a foil to himself, and seem comparatively flat and insipid. Garrick kept up the fever of public admiration as long as any body; but when he returned to the stage after a short absence, no one went to see him. It was the same with Sir Joshua: latterly Romney drew all his sitters from him. So they say the Exhibition is worse every year, though it is just the same, there are the same subjects and the same painters. Admiration is a forced tribute, and to extort it from mankind (envious and ignorant as they are) they must be taken unawares.’ I remarked—‘It was the same in books; if an author was only equal to himself, he was always said to fall off. The blow to make the same impression must be doubled, because we are prepared for it. We give him the whole credit of his first successful production, because it was altogether unexpected; but if he does not rise as much above himself in the second instance, as the first was above nothing, we are disappointed and say he has fallen off, for our feelings are not equally excited.’—‘Just,’ said Northcote, ‘as in painting a portrait: people are surprised at the first sitting, and wonder to see how you have got on: but I tell them they will never see so much done again; for at first there was nothing but a blank canvas to work upon, but afterwards you have to improve upon your own design, and this at every step becomes more and more difficult. It puts me in mind of an observation of Opie’s, that it was wrong to suppose that people went on improving to the last in any art or profession: on the contrary, they put their best ideas into their first works (which they have been qualifying themselves to undertake all their lives before); and what they gain afterwards in correctness and refinement, they lose in originality and vigour.’ I assented to this as a very striking and (as I thought) sound remark. He said, ‘I wish you had known Opie: he was a very original-minded man. Mrs. Siddons used to say—“I like to meet Mr. Opie; for then I always hear something I did not know before.” I do not say that he was always right; but he always put your thoughts into a new track, that was worth following. I was very fond of Opie’s conversation; and I remember once when I was expressing my surprise at his having so little of the Cornish dialect; “Why,” he said, “the reason is, I never spoke at all till I knew you and Wolcott.” He was a true genius. Mr. — is a person of great judgment; but I do not learn so much from him. I think this is the difference between sense and genius;—a man of genius judges for himself, and you hear nothing but what is original from him: but a man of sense or with a knowledge of the world, judges as others do; and he is on this account the safest guide to follow, though not, perhaps, the most instructive companion. I recollect Miss Reynolds making nearly the same observation. She said—“I don’t know how it is; I don’t think Miss C— a very clever woman, and yet, whenever I am at a loss about any thing, I always go to consult her, and her advice is almost sure to be right.” The reason was, that this lady, instead of taking her own view of the subject (as a person of superior capacity might have been tempted to do) considered only what light others would view it in, and pronounced her decision according to the prevailing rules and maxims of the world. When old Dr. — married his housemaid, Sterne, on hearing of it, exclaimed, “Ay, I always thought him a genius, and now I’m sure of it!” The truth was (and this was what Sterne meant), that Dr. — saw a thousand virtues in this woman which nobody else did, and could give a thousand reasons for his choice, that no one about him had the wit to answer: but nature took its usual course, and the event turned out as he had been forewarned, according to the former experience of the world in such matters. His being in the wrong did not prove him to be less a genius, though it might impeach his judgment or prudence. He was, in fact, wiser, and saw more of the matter than any one of his neighbours, who might advise him to the contrary; but he was not so wise as the collective experience or common sense of mankind on the subject, which his more cautious friends merely echoed. It is only the man of genius who has any right or temptation to make a fool of himself, by setting up his own unsupported decision against that of the majority. He feels himself superior to any individual in the crowd, and therefore rashly undertakes to act in defiance of the whole mass of prejudice and opinion opposed to him. It is safe and easy to travel in a stage-coach from London to Salisbury: but it would require great strength, boldness, and sagacity to go in a straight line across the country.’
CONVERSATION THE THIRD
Northcote began by saying, ‘You don’t much like Sir Joshua, I know; but I think that is one of your prejudices. If I was to compare him with Vandyke and Titian, I should say that Vandyke’s portraits are like pictures (very perfect ones, no doubt), Sir Joshua’s like the reflection in a looking-glass, and Titian’s like the real people. There is an atmosphere of light and shade about Sir Joshua’s, which neither of the others have in the same degree, together with a vagueness that gives them a visionary and romantic character, and makes them seem like dreams or vivid recollections of persons we have seen. I never could mistake Vandyke’s for any thing but pictures, and I go up to them to examine them as such: when I see a fine Sir Joshua, I can neither suppose it to be a mere picture nor a man; and I almost involuntarily turn back to ascertain if it is not some one behind me reflected in the glass: when I see a Titian, I am riveted to it, and I can no more take my eye off from it, than if it were the very individual in the room. That,’ he said, ‘is, I think, peculiar to Titian, that you feel on your good behaviour in the presence of his keen-looking heads, as if you were before company.’ I mentioned that I thought Sir Joshua more like Rembrandt than like either Titian or Vandyke: he enveloped objects in the same brilliant haze of a previous mental conception.—‘Yes,’ he said; ‘but though Sir Joshua borrowed a great deal, he drew largely from himself: or rather, it was a strong and peculiar feeling of nature working in him and forcing its way out in spite of all impediments, and that made whatever he touched his own. In spite of his deficiency in drawing, and his want of academic rules and a proper education, you see this breaking out like a devil in all his works. It is this that has stamped him. There is a charm in his portraits, a mingled softness and force, a grasping at the end with nothing harsh or unpleasant in the means, that you will find nowhere else. He may go out of fashion for a time: but you must come back to him again, while a thousand imitators and academic triflers are forgotten. This proves him to have been a real genius. The same thing, however, made him a very bad master. He knew nothing of rules which are alone to be taught; and he could not communicate his instinctive feeling of beauty or character to others. I learnt nothing from him while I was with him: and none of his scholars (if I may except myself) ever made any figure at all. He only gave us his pictures to copy. Sir Joshua undoubtedly got his first ideas of the art from Gandy, though he lost them under Hudson; but he easily recovered them afterwards. That is a picture of Gandy’s there (pointing to a portrait of a little girl). If you look into it, you will find the same broken surface and varying outline, that was so marked a characteristic of Sir Joshua. There was nothing he hated so much as a distinct outline, as you see it in Mengs and the French school. Indeed, he ran into the opposite extreme; but it is one of the great beauties of art to show it waving and retiring, now losing and then recovering itself again, as it always does in nature, without any of that stiff, edgy appearance, which only pedants affect or admire. Gandy was never out of Devonshire: but his portraits are common there. His father was patronized by the Duke of Ormond, and one reason why the son never came out of his native county was, that when the Duke of Ormond was implicated in the rebellion to restore the Pretender in 1715, he affected to be thought too deep in his Grace’s confidence and a person of too much consequence to venture up to London, so that he chose to remain in a voluntary exile.’ I asked Northcote if he remembered the name of Stringer at the Academy, when he first came up to town. He said he did, and that he drew very well, and once put the figure for him in a better position to catch the foreshortening. He inquired if I knew any thing about him, and I said I had once vainly tried to copy a head of a youth by him admirably drawn and coloured, and in which he had attempted to give the effect of double vision by a second outline accompanying the contour of the face and features. Though the design might not be in good taste, it was executed in a way that made it next to impossible to imitate. I called on him afterwards at his house at Knutsford, where I saw some spirited comic sketches in an unfinished state,[[89]] and a capital female figure by Cignani. All his skill and love of art had, I found, been sacrificed to his delight in Cheshire ale and the company of country-squires. Tom Kershaw, of Manchester, used to say, that he would rather have been Dan Stringer than Sir Joshua Reynolds at twenty years of age. Kershaw, like other North-country critics, thought more of the executive power than of the æsthetical faculty; forgetting that it signifies comparatively little how well you execute a thing, if it is not worth executing.—In consequence of something that was said of the egotism of artists, he observed, ‘I am sometimes thought cold and cynical myself; but I hope it is not from any such over-weening opinion of myself. I remember once going with Wilkie to Angerstein’s, and because I stood looking and said nothing, he seemed dissatisfied, and said, “I suppose you are too much occupied with admiring, to give me your opinion?” And I answered hastily, “No, indeed! I was saying to myself, ‘And is this all that the art can do?’” But this was not, I am sure, an expression of triumph, but of mortification at the defects which I could not help observing even in the most accomplished works. I knew they were the best, but I could have wished them to be a hundred times better than they were.’
Northcote mentioned a conceited painter of the name of Edwards, who went with Romney to Rome; and when they got into the Sistine Chapel, turning round to him, said, ‘’Egad! George, we’re bit!’—He then spoke of his own journey to Rome, of the beauty of the climate, of the manners of the people, of the imposing effect of the Roman Catholic religion, of its favourableness to the fine arts, of the churches full of pictures, of the manner in which he passed his time, studying and looking into all the rooms in the Vatican: he had no fault to find with Italy, and no wish to leave it. ‘Gracious and sweet was all he saw in her!’ As he talked, he looked as if he saw the different objects pass before him, and his eye glittered with familiar recollections. He said, Raphael did not scorn to look out of himself or to be beholden to others. He took whole figures from Masaccio to enrich his designs, because all he wanted was to advance the art and ennoble human nature. After he saw Michael Angelo, he improved in freedom and breadth; and if he had lived to see Titian, he would have done all he could to avail himself of his colouring. All his works are an effusion of the sweetness and dignity of his own character. He did not know how to make a picture; but for the conduct of the fable and the development of passion and feeling (noble but full of tenderness) there is nobody like him. This is why Hogarth can never come into the lists. He does not lift us above ourselves: our curiosity may be gratified by seeing what men are, but our pride must be soothed by seeing them made better. Why else is Milton preferred to Hudibras, but because the one aggrandises our notions of human nature, and the other degrades it? Who will make any comparison between a Madona of Raphael and a drunken prostitute by Hogarth? Do we not feel more respect for an inspired Apostle than for a blackguard in the streets? Raphael points out the highest perfection of which the human form and faculties are capable, and Hogarth their lowest degradation or most wretched perversion. Look at his attempts to paint the good or beautiful, and you see how faint the impressions of these were in his mind. Yet these are what every one must wish to cherish in his own bosom, and must feel most thankful for to those who lend him the powerful assistance of their unrivalled conceptions of true grandeur and beauty. Sir Joshua strove to do this in his portraits, and this it was that raised him in public estimation; for we all wish to get rid of defects and peculiarities as much as we can. He then said of Michael Angelo, he did not wonder at the fame he had acquired. You are to consider the state of the art before his time, and that he burst through the mean and little manner even of such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Pietro Perugino and through the trammels that confined them, and gave all at once a gigantic breadth and expansion that had never been seen before, so that the world were struck with it as with a display of almost supernatural power, and have never ceased to admire since. We are not to compare it with the examples of art that have followed since, and that would never have existed but for him, but with those that preceded it. He found fault with the figure of the flying monk in the St. Peter Martyr, as fluttering and theatrical, but agreed with me in admiring this picture and in my fondness for Titian in general. He mentioned his going with Prince Hoare and Day to take leave of some fine portraits of Titian’s that hung in a dark corner of a Gallery at Naples; and as Day looked at them for the last time with tears in his eyes, he said ‘Ah! he was a fine old mouser!’—I said, I had repeated this expression (which I had heard him allude to before) somewhere in writing, and was surprised that people did not know what to make of it. Northcote said, ‘Why, that is exactly what I should have thought. There is the difference between writing and speaking. In writing, you address the average quantity of sense or information in the world; in speaking, you pick your audience, or at least know what they are prepared for, or else previously explain what you think necessary. You understand the epithet because you have seen a great number of Titian’s pictures, and know that cat-like, watchful, penetrating look he gives to all his faces, which nothing else expresses, perhaps, so well as the phrase Day made use of: but the world in general know nothing of this; all they know or believe is, that Titian is a great painter like Raphael or any other famous person. Suppose any one was to tell you, Raphael was a fine old mouser: would you not laugh at this as absurd? And yet the other is equally nonsense or incomprehensible to them. No, there is a limit, a conversational licence which you cannot carry into writing. This is one difficulty I have in writing: I do not know the point of familiarity at which I am to stop; and yet I believe I have ideas, and you say I know how to express myself in talking.’
I inquired if he remembered much of Johnson, Burke, and that set of persons? He said, Yes, a good deal, as he had often seen them. Burke came into Sir Joshua’s painting-room one day, when Northcote, who was then a young man, was sitting for one of the children in Count Ugolino. (It is the one in profile with the hand to the face.) He was introduced as a pupil of Sir Joshua’s, and, on his looking up, Mr. Burke said, ‘Then I see that Mr. Northcote is not only an artist, but has a head that would do for Titian to paint.’—Goldsmith and Burke had often violent disputes about politics; the one being a staunch Tory, and the other at that time a Whig and outrageous anti-courtier. One day he came into the room, when Goldsmith was there, full of ire and abuse against the late king, and went on in such a torrent of the most unqualified invective that Goldsmith threatened to leave the room. The other, however, persisted; and Goldsmith went out, unable to bear it any longer. So much for Mr. Burke’s pretended consistency and uniform loyalty! When Northcote first came to Sir Joshua, he wished very much to see Goldsmith; and one day Sir Joshua, on introducing him, asked why he had been so anxious to see him? ‘Because,’ said Northcote, ‘he is a notable[[90]] man.’ This expression, notable, in its ordinary sense, was so contrary to Goldsmith’s character, that they both burst out a-laughing very heartily. Goldsmith was two thousand pounds in debt at the time of his death, which was hastened by his chagrin and distressed circumstances: and when ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ was performed, he was so choked all dinner-time that he could not swallow a mouthful. A party went from Sir Joshua’s to support it. The present title was not fixed upon till that morning. Northcote went with Ralph, Sir Joshua’s man, into the gallery, to see how it went off; and after the second act, there was no doubt of its success. Northcote says, people had a great notion of the literary parties at Sir Joshua’s. He once asked Lord B— to dine with Dr. Johnson and the rest; but though a man of rank and also of good information, he seemed as much alarmed at the idea as if you had tried to force him into one of the cages at Exeter-’Change. Northcote remarked that he thought people of talents had their full share of admiration. He had seen young ladies of quality, Lady Marys and Lady Dorothys, peeping into a room where Mrs. Siddons was sitting, with all the same timidity and curiosity as if it were some preternatural being—he was sure more than if it had been the Queen. He then made some observations on the respect paid to rank, and said, ‘However ridiculous it might seem, it was no more than the natural expression of the highest respect in other cases. For instance, as to that of bowing out of the King’s presence backwards, would you not do the same if you were introduced to Dr. Johnson for the first time? You would contrive not to turn your back upon him, till you were out of the room.’ He said, ‘You violent politicians make more rout about royalty than it is worth: it is only the highest place, and somebody must fill it, no matter who: neither do the persons themselves think so much of it as you imagine. They are glad to get into privacy as much as they can. Nor is it a sinecure. The late King (I have been told) used often to have to sign his name to papers, and do nothing else for three hours together, till his fingers fairly ached, and then he would take a walk in the garden, and come back to repeat the same drudgery for three hours more. So, when they told Louis XV. that if he went on with his extravagance, he would bring about a Revolution and be sent over to England with a pension, he merely asked, “Do you think the pension would be a pretty good one?”’ He noticed the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, and praised them for their extreme vivacity and great insight into human nature. Once when the mob had besieged the palace, and the Cardinal was obliged to go and appease them, a brick-bat was flung at him and knocked him down, and one of the assailants presenting a bayonet at his throat, he suddenly called out, ‘Oh, you wretch! if your father could have seen you in this barbarous action, what would he have said?’ The man immediately withdrew, though, says the Cardinal, ‘I knew no more of his father than the babe unborn.’ Northcote then adverted to the talent of players for drollery and sudden shifts and expedients, and said that by living in an element of comic invention, they imbibed a portion of it. He repeated that jest of F. Reynolds, who filled up the blank in a militia paper that was sent him with the description, ‘Old, lame, and a coward;’ and another story told of Matthews, the comedian, who being left in the room with an old gentleman and a little child, and the former putting the question to it, ‘Well, my dear, which do you like best, the dog or the cat?’ by exercising his powers of ventriloquism, made the child seem to answer, ‘I don’t care a d—mn for either,’—to the utter confusion of the old gentleman, who immediately took the father to task for bringing up his son in such profaneness and total want of common humanity.
He then returned to the question of the inconsistent and unreasonable expectations of mankind as to their success in different pursuits, and answered the common complaint, ‘What a shame it was that Milton only got thirteen pounds nine shillings and sixpence for “Paradise Lost.”’ He said, ‘Not at all; he did not write it to get money, he had gained what he had proposed by writing it, not thirteen pounds nine shillings and sixpence, but an immortal reputation. When Dr. Johnson was asked why he was not invited out to dine as Garrick was, he answered, as if it was a triumph to him, “Because great lords and ladies don’t like to have their mouths stopped!” But who does like to have their mouths stopped? Did he, more than others? People like to be amused in general; but they did not give him the less credit for wisdom and a capacity to instruct them by his writings. In like manner, it has been said, that the King only sought one interview with Dr. Johnson; whereas, if he had been a buffoon or a sycophant, he would have asked for more. No, there was nothing to complain of: it was a compliment paid by rank to letters, and once was enough. The King was more afraid of this interview than Dr. Johnson was; and went to it as a school-boy to his task. But he did not want to have this trial repeated every day, nor was it necessary. The very jealousy of his self-love marked his respect: and if he had thought less of Dr. Johnson, he would have been more willing to risk the encounter. They had each their place to fill, and would best preserve their self-respect, and perhaps their respect for each other, by remaining in their proper sphere. So they make an outcry about the Prince leaving Sheridan to die in absolute want. He had left him long before: was he to send every day to know if he was dying? These things cannot be helped, without exacting too much of human nature.’ I agreed to this view of the subject, and said,—I did not see why literary people should repine if they met with their deserts in their own way, without expecting to get rich; but that they often got nothing for their pains but unmerited abuse and party obloquy.—‘Oh, it is not party-spite,’ said he, ‘but the envy of human nature. Do you think to distinguish yourself with impunity? Do you imagine that your superiority will be delightful to others? Or that they will not strive all they can, and to the last moment, to pull you down? I remember myself once saying to Opie, how hard it was upon the poor author or player to be hunted down for not succeeding in an innocent and laudable attempt, just as if they had committed some heinous crime! And he answered, “They have committed the greatest crime in the eyes of mankind, that of pretending to a superiority over them!” Do you think that party abuse, and the running down particular authors is any thing new? Look at the manner in which Pope and Dryden were assailed by a set of reptiles. Do you believe the modern periodicals had not their prototypes in the party-publications of that day? Depend upon it, what you take for political cabal and hostility is (nine parts in ten) private pique and malice oozing out through those authorized channels.’
We now got into a dispute about nicknames; and H—me coming in and sitting down at my elbow, my old pugnacious habit seemed to return upon me. Northcote contended, that they had always an appropriate meaning: and I said,—‘Their whole force consisted in their having absolutely none but the most vague and general.’—‘Why,’ said Northcote, ‘did my father give me the name of “Fat Jack,” but because I was lean?’ He gave an instance which I thought made against himself, of a man at Plymouth, a baker by profession, who had got the name of Tiddydoll—he could not tell how. ‘Then,’ said I, ‘it was a name without any sense or meaning.’—‘Be that as it may,’ said Northcote, ‘it almost drove him mad. The boys called after him in the street, besieged his shop-windows; even the soldiers took it up, and marched to parade, beating time with their feet, and repeating, Tiddydoll, Tiddydoll, as they passed by his door. He flew out upon them at the sound with inextinguishable fury, and was knocked down and rolled in the kennel, and got up in an agony of rage and shame, his white clothes covered all over with mud. A gentleman, a physician in the neighbourhood, one day called him in and remonstrated with him on the subject. He advised him to take no notice of his persecutors. “What,” he said, “does it signify? Suppose they were to call me Tiddydoll?”—“There,” said the man, “you called me so yourself; you only sent for me in to insult me!” and, after heaping every epithet of abuse upon him, flew out of the house in a most ungovernable passion.’ I told Northcote this was just the thing I meant. Even if a name had confessedly no meaning, by applying it constantly and by way of excellence to another, it seemed as if he must be an abstraction of insignificance: whereas, if it pointed to any positive defect or specific charge, it was at least limited to the one, and you stood a chance of repelling the other. The virtue of a nickname consisted in its being indefinable and baffling all proof or reply. When H—me was gone, Northcote extolled his proficiency in Hebrew, which astonished me not a little, as I had never heard of it. I said, he was a very excellent man, and a good specimen of the character of the old Presbyterians, who had more of the idea of an attachment to principle, and less of an obedience to fashion or convenience, from their education and tenets, than any other class of people. Northcote assented to this statement, and concluded by saying, that H—me was certainly a very good man, and had no fault but that of not being fat.