than distress a dying friend, although he did not intend to
observe it strictly.

Sir Joshua possessed the high art of inciting himself to work by
repeatedly soliciting the most beautiful and most interesting persons of
the time to sit to him. The lovely face of Kitty Fisher was painted by
him five times, and no less frequently that of the charming actress,
Mrs. Abington, who was also noted for her _bel esprit_, and was
evidently a favorite with the great painter. There are two or three
pictures of Mrs. Siddons by his hand, and many of the beautiful Maria
Countess Waldegrave, afterwards Duchess of Gloucester, a lock of whose
"delicate golden-brown" hair was found by Mr. Taylor in a side-pocket of
one of Sir Joshua's note-books,--"loveliest of all, whom Reynolds seems
never to have been tired of painting, nor she of sitting to him."

Of his numerous and invaluable pictures of Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith and
Admiral Keppel, it is hardly necessary to speak. Many of them are well
known to us from engravings.

To a painter, this Life is of incalculable interest and value. The
account of his manner of handling "the vehicles" is minute and faithful;
and if, as Northcote complained, who was a pupil of Reynolds, Sir Joshua
could not teach, he could only show you how he worked,--many an artist
can gather from these pages what Northcote gathered by looking from
palette to canvas. The descriptions of some of the paintings are rich in
color, and are worthy of the highest praise.

Sir Joshua Reynolds is one of the few men of genius who have been also
men of society. In his note-books for the year, sometimes the number of
engagements for dinners and visits would preponderate over the number of
his sitters, and sometimes the scale would be about equal. Yet the
amount of the latter was always astonishingly large. Perhaps no man,
through a long series of years, was more esteemed and sought by the most
honorable in society than he; while his diary, with its meagre jottings,
brings before us a motley and phantasmagorical procession of the wisest
and wittiest, the most beautiful and most notorious men and women of
that period, who thronged his studio. We can see the bitterest political
opponents passing each other upon the threshold of his painting-room,
and, what was far more agreeable to Sir Joshua than having to do with
these stormy petrels, we can see the worshipping knight and his lovely
mistress, or the fair-cheeked children of many