LIFE OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

Joseph Farington’s (1747–1821) Memoirs of the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds was published in 1819. This review was republished in Criticisms on Art (1843–4), and in Essays on the Fine Arts (1873).

PAGE [172]. Dispute between their late President, etc. Relating to the election of Joseph Bonomi as professor of perspective. Reynolds resigned his membership of the Academy in Feb. 1790, but afterwards withdrew his resignation. Edmond Malone (1741–1812) published a Memoir of Reynolds in 1797. [173]. ‘Pleased with a rattle,’ etc. Pope, Essay on Man, II. 276. [174]. Richardson. Jonathan Richardson (1665–1745), author of A Theory of Painting (1715). Hudson. Thomas Hudson (1701–1779), portrait-painter. [177]. The French materialists. See Helvétius, De l’Esprit, Discourse III. [178]. ‘A greater general capacity,’ etc. See Johnson’s Life of Cowley. [180]. Hayman. See Vol. i. (The Round Table) note to p. 149. Highmore. Ibid. ‘Darted contagious fire.’ Paradise Lost, IX. 1036. [181]. Gandy. See vol VI. (Table Talk), note to p. 21. [184]. In the days of Montesquieu. See his De l’ Esprit des Lois. [185]. ‘Like flowers,’ etc. Macbeth, Act IV. Sc. 3. [186]. Says Schlegel. Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, I. ‘Like the forced pace,’ etc. Henry IV., Part I. Act III. Sc. 1. ‘With coy, reluctant,’ etc. ‘And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.’ Paradise Lost, IV. 311. Terrae filii. Cf. Persius, Satires, VI. 59. ‘The crown which Ariadne,’ etc. Cf. The Faerie Queene, Book VI. Canto X. St. 13. ‘Their affections,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 1. [187]. In that part of the country. Winterslow presumably. ‘Returning with a choral song,’ etc. Wordsworth, Ruth, 53–54. ‘We also are not Arcadians!’ Hazlitt frequently quoted the old saying, attributed to Schidoni, ‘Et ego in Arcadia vixi.’ See, e.g. Table Talk, vol. VI. p. 168. [188]. ‘The unbought grace of life.’ Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 89). [190]. Leo. Leo X. (1475–1521), son of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Piranesi’s drawings. Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778), engraver of architecture and ancient ruins. Winckelman. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), author of Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764). [191]. ‘All eyes’ etc. Cf. Isaiah, xlv. 22–23, and Romans, xiv. 11. ‘Amazing brightness,’ etc. Otway, Venice Preserved, Act I. Sc. 1. ‘A present deity,’ etc. Dryden, Alexander’s Feast, 35–36. The Madona of Foligno. Raphael’s, in the Vatican. The ceiling at Parma. Painted by Girolamo Mazzola, a pupil of Correggio. [192]. Leonardo’s Last Supper. This famous fresco, now almost entirely destroyed, was at the convent of S. Maria delle Grazie at Milan. The institution of Academies, etc. Cf. vol I. The Round Table, p. 160 and note, and vol. IX. p. 311 et seq. [195]. ‘The cat and canary-bird,’ etc. See ante, p. 193. ‘Leaving the thing,’ etc. Philippians, iii. 13. [196]. The Catalogue Raisonnée. Cf. vol. I., The Round Table, pp. 140 et seq. ‘With jealous leer malign.’ Paradise Lost, IV. 503. [197]. Grampound. The borough was disfranchised for corrupt practices in 1821. ‘That is true history.’ This was said by Fuseli. See vol. VI. (Mr. Northcote’s Conversations), p. 340. [199]. Mr. West’s pictures. Benjamin West (1738–1820), president of the Royal Academy from 1792. Cf. vol. IX. pp. 318 et seq. Barry. James Barry (1741–1806). Hazlitt refers to one of the pictures Barry painted for the Society of Arts in John Street, Adelphi. [200]. ‘The bodiless creations,’ etc. Cf. Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 4, ll. 136–137. ‘Like the baseless fabric,’ etc. The Tempest, Act IV. Sc. 1. Mr. Haydon. Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846). Mr. W. C. Hazlitt has given an account of his relations with Hazlitt. See Memoirs, I. 209–213, and Four Generations of a Literary Family, I. 234–236. At his house Hazlitt met Keats. ‘So from the root,’ etc. Paradise Lost, V. 479–481. [201]. His own Penitent Girl. Hazlitt seems to refer to a figure in the Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. His Christ. Haydon’s picture, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, was first exhibited in 1820. At the private view, Haydon says (Tom Taylor’s Life, I. 371), ‘the room was full, Keats and Hazlitt were up in a corner, really rejoicing.’ Hazlitt is introduced into the picture ‘looking at the Saviour as an investigator.’ The picture is now in America. For Mrs. Siddons’s opinion of the picture see Life, I. 372. Mr. Haydon is a devoted, etc. See his letter in The Examiner, March 17, 1816.

THE PERIODICAL PRESS

This essay is referred to by Brougham, who, on August 18, 1837, wrote to Macvey Napier (then editor of the Edinburgh Review): ‘I wish the Newspaper Press had not been flattered so much; at any rate its glaring faults should have been pointed out. This was done, and very ill done, in 1823, when it had hardly any sins to answer for.’ (Selections from the Correspondence of Macvey Napier, p. 199).

PAGE [204]. ‘We are [I am] nothing, if not critical. Othello, Act II. Sc. 1. The words were used by Hazlitt as the motto to A View of the English Stage. Terra plena, etc. Æneid, I. 460. ‘Large discourse,’ etc. Hamlet, Act IV. Sc. 4. [205]. ‘The pomp of elder days.’ Thomas Warton’s Sonnet, ‘Written in a blank leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon.’ [206]. ‘Cabin’d,’ etc. Macbeth, Act III. Sc. 4. [207]. The Children of the Mist. In The Legend of Montrose. ‘A chemist,’ etc. Absalom and Achitophel, I. 550. [208]. Sir Thomas Lawrence. President of the Royal Academy from 1820 till his death in 1830. ‘Though he should have,’ etc. Adapted from 1 Corinthians, xiii. 1. ‘The toe of the scholar,’ etc. Varied from Hamlet, Act V. Sc. 1. [209]. ‘Take the good,’ etc. Dryden, Alexander’s Feast, 106. [210]. ‘Make the age to come her own.’ Cowley, The Motto, l. 2. Mille ornatus habet, etc. ‘Mille habet ornatus, mille decenter habet.’ From the first of the Sulpicia poems which are in Book IV. of the Elegies of Tibullus, but the authorship of which is not certainly known. ‘Now this,’ etc. Spenser, Muiopotmos, St. 22. ‘To beguile the time,’ etc. Macbeth, Act I. Sc. 5. [211]. ‘Squeak and gibber.’ Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 1. The St. James’s Chronicle. Started in 1760 as a tri-weekly, independent Whig evening paper. It was for a time edited by James Mill. 212 note. Mrs. Radcliffe, the novelist, was married in 1787 to William Radcliffe, an Oxford graduate and a student of law, described by Sir Walter Scott (Lives of the Novelists) as ‘afterwards proprietor and editor of the English Chronicle.’ [213]. The Morning Chronicle. Founded June 28, 1769. The early notable editors were William Woodfall (1746–1803), James Perry (1756–1821), who was editor from 1789 to 1817, and John Black (1783–1855). For Perry cf. vol. VI. Table Talk, p. 292. Porson. Richard Porson (1759–1808) was Perry’s brother-in-law. Jekyll. Joseph Jekyll (d. 1837) contributed many of his jokes to The Morning Chronicle. [214]. The Marquis Marialva. Gil Blas, Livre VII. chap x. [215]. Lord Nugent. Presumably Robert, Earl Nugent (1702–1788), who retired from parliamentary life in 1784. It is odd that Hazlitt should refer to so well-known a man as a Lord Nugent. The Times Newspaper. John Walter (1739–1812) in 1785 started The Daily Universal Register, the name of which was changed on Jan. 1, 1788 to The Times or Daily Universal Register, and on March 18, 1788 to The Times. A steam-engine. See vol. III. Political Essays, p. 158.

LANDOR’S IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS

Hazlitt here reviews the first two volumes of Walter Savage Landor’s (1775–1864) Imaginary Conversations, published in 1824. A second edition, ‘corrected and enlarged,’ appeared in 1826, and vol. III. completing the ‘first series,’ in 1828. Vols. IV. and V. constituting the ‘second series,’ were published in 1829. For an account of Hazlitt’s visit to Landor at Florence in 1825 see Forster’s Walter Savage Landor, a Biography, II. 201–211, where a subsequent letter from Hazlitt to Landor is quoted, in which he says: ‘I am much gratified that you are pleased with the Spirit of the Age. Somebody ought to like it, for I am sure there will be plenty to cry out against it. I hope you did not find any sad blunders in the second volume; but you can hardly suppose the depression of body and mind under which I wrote some of those articles.’ This review of the Imaginary Conversations seems to have been cut about a good deal by Jeffrey.

PAGE [231]. ‘Great wits,’ etc. Absalom and Achitophel, I. 163. [233]. ‘It travels in a road’ [strait], etc. Troilus and Cressida, Act III. Sc. 3. [235]. Dashed and brewed. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, I. 114. ‘To every good word,’ etc. Epistle to Titus, I. 16. [238]. ‘All in conscience,’ etc. Chaucer, Prologue, 150. Note. Tâtar. Cf., e.g.,

‘Persian and Copt and Tatar, in one bond