"In this respect he is the most original of modern artists, and forges one end of the chain of which the Greeks forged the other; the rest of the masters, Florentine, Venetian, and Flemish, stand between them; and when, nowadays, our over-excited sensibility, our extravagant curiosity in the pursuit of subtleties, our unsparing search of the true, our divination of the remote and the obscure in human nature, seeks for predecessors and masters, it is in him and in Shakespeare that Balzac and Delacroix are able to find them." SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. In Plympton, Devonshire, July 16, 1723, the great English painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, was born. His father, Samuel, and his grandfather, John, were both ministers, while his mother and grandmother were both daughters of clergymen. [Illustration: SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.] Samuel Reynolds was a gentle, kindly man, master of the grammar school at Plympton, supporting his eleven children on the meagre income of seven hundred and fifty dollars a year. He had married Theophila Potter, when she was twenty-three, the lovely daughter of a lovely young mother, Theophila Baker, who, marrying against the consent of her father, was disinherited by him, and at the early death of her devoted husband wept herself blind, and died broken-hearted. Joshua, the seventh child of Samuel and Theophila, was a thoughtful, aspiring boy, who cared more for drawing than for Ovid, and spent his early years in copying the illustrations from "Plutarch's Lives" and Jacob Cats's "Book of Emblems," which his grandmother, on his father's side, had brought with her from Holland. His sisters were also fond of drawing, and as pencils and paper could not be afforded in the minister's family, they drew on the whitewashed walls of a long passage, with burnt sticks. The boy's sketches were the poorest, and he was therefore nicknamed "the clown." On the back of a Latin exercise, the lad drew a wall with a window in it. Under it, the not highly delighted father, who wished his boy to be a learned doctor, wrote: "This is drawn by Joshua in school, out of pure idleness." But when in his eighth year the boy made a fine sketch of the grammar school with its cloister, having studied carefully the Jesuit's "Treatise on Perspective," the astonished father said, "Now, this exemplifies what the author of the 'Perspective' says in his preface, 'that, by observing the rules laid down in this book, a man may do wonders;' for this is wonderful." Joshua was fond of literary composition, and early composed some rules of conduct for himself, which influenced him through life. He said, "The great principle of being happy in this world is not to mind or be affected with small things," a maxim which he carried out in his peaceful, self-poised, and remarkably happy life. "If you take too much care of yourself, nature will cease to take care of you," he said, and thus without excessive self-consciousness he did his great work and reaped his great reward.