attained eminence in the profession, and whom I knew well. Here, with an ingenuousness characteristic of the man, he acknowledged to me how, starvation staring him in the face, _he_ stared in the governor's; and the governor being rather a hard-featured man, whose likeness, though he had never taken a portrait, he thought he could hit; when the governor admired the miniature, and asked him, "If it was his?" he did not resist the temptation, and said, "Yes." Upon which the governor sat to him. Then others sat to him; and so he left the island, with a replenished purse, and from that time became a portrait-painter. If the poor fellow had been the veriest dauber, you, Eusebius, would have sat to him twenty times over, and have told all the country round quite as great a fib as he did the governor, that he was a very Raffaelle in outline, and Titian in coloring. And what shall the "recording angel" do? Poor fellow! he had no conceit. But you, Eusebius, need not trust or give your countenance, in the way of the art to any man because you like his history or his manners. A thing you are very likely to do in spite of this advice, though you multiply portraits for "Saracen's Heads." Foolish artists themselves, who affect to talk of the great style, and set themselves up as geniuses, speak slightingly of portrait-painting, as degrading--as pandering to vanity, &c. I verily believe, that half this common cant arose from jealousy of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Degradation indeed!--as if Raffaelle and Titian, and Vandyk and Reynolds, degraded the art, or were degraded by their practice; and as to pandering to vanity--view it in another light, and it is feeding affection. I knew a painter, who honourably refused to paint a lady's picture, when he waited upon her on purpose, sent by some injudicious friends to take her portrait in her last days. She had been a woman of great celebrity--she received the painter--but, with a weakness, pointed first to one side of the room where were portraits of earls and bishops, saying, "these are or were all my particular friends"--and then to the other side of the room, to a well filled library--"and these are all my works." "Now," said the painter to me, "I did not think it fair to her reputation to take her portrait--and she had had many taken at better times." Here was one who would not pander to vanity. After all, it is astonishing how few flattering painters there have been. Even he who made Venus, Minerva, and Juno, starting with astonishment at the presence of Queen Elizabeth, certainly made her by far the ugliest of the quartette. You may see the picture at Hampton Court. She must have been difficult to please, for she insisted upon being painted without shadow. "Glorious Gloriana" was to be the sun of female beauty. She is quite as well as some in "The Book." For modern "beauty" manufacturers make beauty to consist in silliness or sentimentality.