ester and her son, as Diana disarming Cupid._

_Lady Blake, as Juno receiving the Cestus of Venus._

_Miss Morris as Hope nursing Love._

That all of them were, so to speak, "fancy portraits" is not entirely
without significance. Portraiture, the painters bread and butter, was
apparently deemed hardly suitable for the occasion, and among a list of
the pictures which attracted most attention Northcote only includes the
portraits of the _King and Queen_ by Nathaniel Dance, _Lady Molyneux_ by
Gainsborough, and the _Duke of Gloucester_ by Cotes. The rest are as
follows:--_The Departure of Regulus from Rome_, and _Venus lamenting the
Death of Adonis_, by Benjamin West; _Hector and Andromache_, and _Venus
directing Aeneas and Achates_, by Angelica Kauffmann; _A Piping Boy_,
and _A Candlelight Piece_, by Nathaniel Hone; _An Altar-Piece_ of the
Annunciation by Cipriani; _Hebe_, and _A Boy Playing Cricket_, by Cotes;
A landscape by Barrett, and _Shakespeare's Black-smith_, by Penny.

In all, Reynolds exhibited two hundred and fifty-two pictures during the
thirty-two years of his life in which exhibitions existed, namely from
1760 to 1791; of which two hundred and twenty-eight went to the Royal
Academy.

Of these, or most of them, ample records and criticisms may be found in
the copious literature which has grown up around his name. For our
present purpose a glance at his influence, his methods, and his
circumstances has seemed to me to be more in point, and as a succinct
estimate of the man and his work from one of his most illustrious
contemporaries, the following passage may be added by way of
conclusion:--

"Sir Joshua Reynolds," wrote Edmund Burke six years after the painter's
death, "was on very many accounts one of the most memorable men of his
time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant
arts to the other glories of his country. In taste, in grace, in
facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and harmony of
colouring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned ages. In
portraiture he went beyond them, for he communicated to that description
of the art, in which English artists are the most engaged, a fancy and a
dignity derived from the higher branches, which even those who
professed, them in a superior manner, did not always preserve when they
delineated individual nature. His portraits remind the spectator of the
invention of history and the amenity of landscape. In painting