s off the sleeping baby, while his mother and sister
went to the garden for flowers. The baby smiled in its sleep, and the
boy was captivated. He must catch that smile and keep it. He found
some paper on the table, scrambled for a pen, and with red and black
ink made a hasty but striking picture of the little beauty. He heard
his mother returning, and conscious of having been in mischief, tried
to conceal his production; but she detected and captured it, and
regarded it long and lovingly, exclaiming as her daughter entered, "He
has really made a likeness of little Sally!" She then caught up the
boy in her arms, and kissed instead of chiding him, and he--looking up
encouraged--told her he could make the flowers, too, if she would
permit. The awakening of genius in Benjamin West has been distinctly
traced to this incident, as the time when he first discovered that he
could imitate the forms of such objects as pleased his sense of sight.
And the incident itself has been aptly styled "the birth of fine arts
in the New World."

The Quaker boy, in course of years, left the wilderness of America to
become the president of the Royal Academy in London. His
irreproachable character not less than his excellence as an artist,
gave him commanding position among his contemporaries. From first to
last he was distinguished for his indefatigable industry. The number
of his pictures has been estimated, by a writer in _Blackwood's
Magazine_, at three thousand; and Dunlap says that a gallery capable
of holding them would be four hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and
forty feet high--or a wall a quarter of a mile long.

The parents of Benjamin West were sincere and self-respecting, and in
the language of the times, well-to-do. His mother's grandfather was
the intimate and confidential friend of William Penn. The family of
his father claimed direct descent from the Black Prince and Lord
Delaware, of the time of King Edward III. Colonel James West was the
friend and companion in arms of John Hampden. When Benjamin West was at
work upon his great picture of the "Institution of the Garter," the
King of England was delighted when the Duke of Buckingham assured him
that West had an ancestral right to a place among the warriors and
knights of his own painting. The Quaker associates of the parents of
the artist, the patriarchs of Pennsylvania, regarded their asylum in
America as the place for affectionate intercourse--free from all the
military