yed himself in
daubing on walls, and drawing on scraps of paper all sorts of little
soldiers.

Like his father and grandfather, his principal lessons as a student were
drawn from the paternal experience, and certainly no professor could
more willingly and faithfully save him all the loss of time and patience
occasioned by the long and often fruitless groping of the almost
solitary Art-student. He was also thus saved from falling into the
errors of the school of David. Certainly no great _penchant_ towards the
antique is discoverable in his father's works; nor in his own do we find
painted casts of Greek statues dressed in the uniforms of the nineteenth
century. At twenty, it is true, he tried, but without success, the
classic subject offered to competition at the Academy for the prize of
visiting Rome. The study of the antique did not much delight him. On the
contrary, he rather joined with the innovators, whose example was then
undermining the over-classic influence of David's school, the most
formidable and influential of whom, a youth about his own age, and a
fellow-student in his father's atelier, was then painting a great
picture, sadly decried at the time, but now considered one of the
masterpieces of the French school in the Louvre--the "Raft of the
Medusa." Gericault was his companion in the studio and in the field, at
the easel and on horseback; and we might trace here one of the many
instances of the influence which this powerful and original genius
exercised on the young artists of his time, and which, had it not been
arrested by his premature death in January, 1824, would have made
Gericault more strikingly distinguished as one of the master-spirits in
French Art, and the head of a school entirely the opposite to that of
David.

Horace's youth, however, did not pass entirely under the smiles of
fortune. He had to struggle with those difficulties of narrow means with
which a very large number of young artists are tolerably intimate. He
had to weather the gales of poverty by stooping to all sorts of
illustrative work, whose execution we fancy must have been often a
severe trial to him. Any youth aiming at "high art," and feeling, though
poor, too proud to bend in order to feed the taste, (grotesque and
unrefined enough, it must be allowed,) of the good public, which artists
somewhat naturally estimate rather contemptuously, might get a lesson of
patience by looking over an endless series of the most variedly