“Sir Joshua Reynolds 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 portrait he was beyond them; for he communicated to that description of the art, in which English artists are the most engaged, a variety, 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 portraits, he appeared not to be raised upon that platform, but to descend to it from a higher sphere. His paintings illustrate his lessons; and his lessons seem to be derived from his paintings. He possessed the theory as perfectly as the practice of his art. To be such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating philosopher. “In full happiness of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert in art, and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed by sovereign powers, and celebrated by distinguished poets, his native humility, modesty, and candour never forsook him, even on surprise or provocation, nor was the least degree of arrogance or assumption visible to the most scrutinising eye, in any part of his conduct or discourse. “His talents of every kind, powerful from nature, and not meanly cultivated by letters--his social virtues in all the relations and in all the habitudes of life--rendered him the centre of a very great and unparalleled variety of agreeable societies, which will be dissipated by his death. He had too much merit not to excite some jealousy, too much innocence to provoke any enmity. The loss of no man of his time can be felt with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow. ‘Hail! and farewell!’” The following letter was addressed to me by my worthy friend Colonel Phillips:[255]-- “DEAR SIR,--If it was not for having you older than your friends would wish you, I should be glad you had been of the party, where I heard an argument between Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds, on the wonderful power of the human eye. Dr. Johnson made a quotation which I do not remember. ‘Sir,’ said Sir Joshua, in reply, ‘that divine effect is produced by the parts appertaining to the eye, and not from its globe, as is generally supposed; the skull must be justly proportioned.’