useful
arts insists on doing what Nature never asked him to do has no place in
the world. Leslie, a second-rate man in all respects, but with a genuine
talent rightly directed, an obscure American, with few friends, no
influential patrons, and a modesty that would never let him obtrude his
claims, worked steadily forward to competence, to reputation, and the
Council of the Academy. The only blunder of his life was his accepting
the Professorship of Drawing at West Point, a place for which he was
unsuited. But this blunder he had the good sense and courage to correct
by the frank acknowledgment of resignation. Altogether his is a career
as pleasant as Haydon's is painful to contemplate, the more so as we
feel that his success was fairly won by honest effort directed by
a contented consciousness of the conditions and limitations of his
faculty.

Nothing can be more agreeable than the career of a successful artist.
His employment does not force upon him the solitude of an author; it
is eminently companionable; from its first design, through all the
processes that bring his work to perfection, he is not shut out from the
encouragement of sympathy; his success is definite and immediate; he
can see it in the crowd around his work at the exhibition; and his very
calling brings him into pleasant contact with beauty, taste, and (if a
portrait-painter) with eminence in every department of human activity.

Leslie's passage through the world was of that equal temper which is
happiest for the man and unhappiest for the biographer. With no dramatic
surprises of fortune, and no great sorrows, his life had scarce any
other alternation than that it went round with the earth through night
and day, and would have been tame but for his necessary labor in an
art which he loved wisely and with the untumultuous sentiment of
an after-honey-moon constancy. We should say that his leading
characteristic was Taste, an external quality, it is true, but one which
is often the indication of more valuable ones lying deeper. In the
conduct of life it insures tact, and in Art a certain gentlemanlike
equipoise, incapable of what is deepest and highest, but secure also
from the vulgar, the grotesque, and the extravagant. Leslie, we think,
was more at home with Addison than with Cervantes.

His autobiographical reminiscences are very entertaining, especially
that part of them which describes a voyage home to America, varied by
a winter in Portugal, duri