Joshua Reynolds was the tenth of the numerous family with which his parents――a worthy and old-fashioned couple――were blessed. His father was a scholar and divine, known and valued in the province for the respectability of his learning, the innocence of his heart, and the simplicity of his mind. Besides, he is stated to have been of so singularly absent a tendency, that once, while performing a journey on horseback, he dropped one of his top-boots by the way, without perceiving the unusual and inconvenient loss he had met with. Doubtless when he arrived at home, this laughable and disastrous incident would furnish his fruitful dame, Theophila, with the text of a diffuse and impassioned curtain-lecture, and, perhaps, make the reverend personage considerably more careful when in future he escaped for a while from his toils and fatigues as head-master of the grammar-school of Plympton. There his distinguished son was born on the 16th of July, 1723; and there he was ere long inspired with the ambition of linking his name indestructibly with that glorious art of which he became so successful a cultivator. The occasion of the high-fated infant’s presentation at the baptismal font was rendered memorable by a mistake so awkward and peculiar, as to furnish reasonable grounds for believing the mental characteristics of the elder Reynolds to have been then at work. In any case, the officiating clergyman was led by some process to pronounce the Christian name of Joseph instead of that by which the child then presented has since been known to the world, as well as registered in the records of fortune and the rolls of fame. On the education of young Reynolds much less attention was bestowed than might have been expected from the circumstances of his birth; and he did not profit to any large extent by such instruction as he received. He did not obtain any great stock of classical knowledge; but his deficiency in this important respect, though never supplied, was, in after days, countervailed and thrown into the background by the information which he had acquired in untiring study of Nature and perseverance in Art, in that commerce with the most refined portion of the British public, of which, for many long years, he had the advantage, and in the constant and familiar intercourse which, during prosperous manhood, he maintained with men of genius, intellect, and erudition. But, however little inclined to pore over Latin and Greek books, his heart was, without loss of time, turned toward an accomplishment which he afterward found of infinitely greater value. Almost in infancy he began to show signs of his vocation for the pursuit which made him one of the most remarkable men, and the greatest painter, of his age; and his first effort was the copying of some drawings made by his sisters. He was then in early boyhood, and he next applied the artistic skill he possessed to the imitation of such