l-delivered speeches. He was seldom at a loss; and so
highly was his eloquence appreciated within the walls of the Academy,
that it had been common with more than one Royal Academician to remark
whenever a great speaker was mentioned--"Did you ever hear the
President--you should hear the President,"--as if Canning and Stanley had
been united in Sir Martin Archer Shee.

He has but little claim to be remembered as a poet. His verse wants
vigor, and his examples are deficient in novelty of illustration. The
notes to both his poems are, however, valuable, and his poetry is perhaps
more frequently read for its prose illustrations than for the beauty of
its versification or the value of the truths which it seeks to inculcate.
As a portrait-painter he was eclipsed by several or his
contemporaries,--by Lawrence and by Hoppner,--by Phillips, Jackson, and
Raeburn. He had a fine eye for color; while his leading want was,
proportion, more especially in his heads. Compare his head of Chantrey
with the portraits of Chantrey by Jackson and Raeburn, and the defect is
at once obvious; or compare his head of Mr. Hallam with the head of Mr.
Hallam by Phillips, or with the living head--since happily Mr. Hallam is
still among us. How, then, it will be asked, is Sir Martin to be
remembered: by his poems or by his portraits?--by his speeches or by his
annual addresses to the students? The question is not difficult of
solution. His pictures in the Vernon Gallery will not preserve his name,
nor will his portraits viewed as works of Art. His name will scend in the
History of Painting as a clever artist with greater accomplishments than
have commonly fallen to the class to which he belongs,--and as the
painter who has preserved to us the faces and figures of Sir Thomas
Munro, Sir Thomas Picton, Sir Eyre Coote, Sir James Scarlett, and Sir
Henry Halford. There was merit, we may add, in his portrait of the poet
Moore. Principally, however, he will be remembered as one of the
Presidents of the Royal Academy.

* * * * *

GERARD TROOST, M.D.

Dr. GERARD TROOST, for a long period one of the most eminent naturalists
of the United States, died on the 14th of August at Nashville, where he
had been for twenty years Professor of Chemistry and Natural History in
the University of Tennessee. A native of Holland, and educated in one of
her universities, he devoted himself to the natural sciences. For the
sake of improvemen