[108] His father, the Rev. Malachi Hitchins, Vicar of St. Hilary and Gwinear, was Assistant Astronomer at Greenwich, and first Computer of the Nautical Almanac. [109] Martyn used finely to speak of prayer as 'a visit to the invisible world.' [110] It was destroyed in the mutiny of 1857. [111] The late lamented Professor Palmer, the well-known Oriental scholar, who perished in the attempt made during the recent Egyptian campaign to detach the native supporters of Arabi from their leader's cause, superintended, with Dr. Bruce, a new edition of Martyn's Persian Version of the New Testament. _OPIE_, THE PAINTER. [Illustration: (beginning of chapter vignette.)] _OPIE_, THE PAINTER. 'A wondrous Cornishman, who is carrying all before him! He is Caravaggio and Velasquez in one!'--_Sir Joshua Reynolds to Northcote. (Redgrave's 'Century of Painters.'_) Cornwall--so far as I am aware--has contributed only two members to the Royal Academy of Arts, since its foundation on 10th December, 1768.[112] Henry Bone, of Truro, and John Opie,[113] born in May, 1761, at Harmony Cot (once known as Blowing House[114]), near the hamlet of Mithian, in the out-of-the-way parish of St. Agnes. The bleak desolate moors, saturated by frequent hissing rain-storms, and scarred with mine-heaps, the jagged cliff-coast, and the dark rolling Atlantic waves of the neighbouring sea, have a savage grandeur of their own which cannot have been without its effect on the youthful mind of the future professor of painting. For, though he rose to the high position of a Royal Academician when only about twenty-seven years of age, we shall seek, I think, in vain amongst his works for that delicate, airy grace of many of his more courtly contemporaries, which no one admired more than himself; and we shall find instead an original, broad, and manly, though somewhat grim and sombre style, which may well have been inspired by the wildness and gloom of his surroundings when a child on this remote 'bench of the world-school.' Allan Cunningham says well of him that he was not 'the servile _follower_ of any man, or of any school;' and, as a matter of fact, his self-reliance early showed itself. On seeing a butterfly painted by one Mark Oates, an officer of Marines, an amateur artist of some merit (whose portrait Opie afterwards painted),--Jan Oppie (as his name was sometimes pronounced) exclaimed: '_I_ can paint it as well as Mark Oates.' Opie's father, Edward Opie, who died while John was quite young, and his grandfather were both of them carpenters and builders, though a writer in the _Fine Arts Magazine_ has striven to show that the family was really of old and gentle descent. _Tonkin_ (who, as a St. Agnes man, ought to have known) says the Opies came from Ennis, or De Insula, in St. Erme.