Barry having vainly attempted to decorate St. Paul’s, executed the paintings now at the Society of Arts for his mere expenses, but eventually, one way and another, cleared a considerable sum by them. He painted them, as he said, to prove that Englishmen had a genius for high art, music, and other refinements of life. They are fairly drawn, often elegantly and reasonably well grouped, but bad in colour. The heterogeneous dresses are jumbled together with bad taste--Dr. Burney in a toupee floats among water-nymphs, and William Penn’s wig and hat are ludicrously obtrusive. The perspective is often “out,” and the attitudes are stiff; still, historically speaking, the pictures are large-minded and interesting; and, in spite of his faults, one likes to think of the brave Irishman busy on his scaffold, railing at Reynolds and defying everybody. Barry was really a self-deceiver, like Haydon, and aimed far beyond his powers. At Osborne’s Hotel, in John Street, the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands resided while on a visit to England in the reign of George IV. A comic song written on their arrival was once popular, though now forgotten; and Theodore Hook produced a quaint epigram on their death by small-pox, the point of which was, that one day Death, being hungry, called for “two Sandwiches.” The epigram was not without the unfeeling wit peculiar to that heartless lounger at the clubs, who spent his life amusing the great people, and who died at last a worn-out spendthrift, _sans_ character, _sans_ everything.