It has been said that Reynolds, in the days of his progressive triumphs in Leicester Square, thought continually of the glory of his being one day placed by the side of Vandyck and Rubens, and that he entertained no envious idea of being better than Hogarth, Gainsborough, and his old master, Hudson. Reynolds, nevertheless, served all three in much the same way that Dryden served Shakespeare; namely, he disparaged quite as extensively as he praised them. Hogarth, on the east side of Leicester Square, felt no local accession of honour when Reynolds set up his easel on the western side. The new comer was social; the old settler ‘kept himself to himself,’ as the wise saw has it. ‘Study the works of the great masters for ever,’ was, we are told, the utterance of Sir Oracle on the west side. From the east came Hogarth’s utterance, in the assertion, ‘There is only one school, and Nature is the mistress of it.’ For Reynolds’s judgment Hogarth had a certain contempt. ‘The most ignorant people about painting,’ he said to Walpole, ‘are the painters themselves. There’s Reynolds, who certainly has genius; why, but t’other day, he offered a hundred pounds for a picture that I would not hang in my cellar.’ Hogarth undoubtedly qualified his sense with some nonsense: ‘Talk of sense, and study, and all that; why, it is owing to the good sense of the English that they have not painted better.’ It was at one of Reynolds’s suppers in the square that an incident took place which aroused the wit-power of Johnson. The rather plain sister of the artist had been called upon by the company, after supper, as the custom was, to give a toast. She hesitated, and was accordingly required, again according to custom, to give the ugliest man she knew. In a moment the name of Oliver Goldsmith dropped from her lips, and immediately a sympathising lady on the opposite side of the table rose and shook hands with Miss Reynolds across the table. Johnson had heard the expression, and had also marked the pantomimic performance of sympathy, and he capped both by a remark which set the table in a roar, and which was to an effect which cut smartly in three ways. ‘Thus,’ said he, ‘the ancients, on the commencements of their friendships, used to sacrifice a beast betwixt them.’ The affair ends prettily. A few days after the ‘Traveller’ was published Johnson read it aloud from beginning to end to delighted hearers, of whom Miss Reynolds was one. As Johnson closed the book she emphatically remarked, ‘Well, I never more shall think Dr. Goldsmith ugly.’ Miss Reynolds, however, did not get over her idea. Her brother painted the portrait of the new poet, in the Octagon Room in the Square; the mezzotinto engraving of it was speedily all over the town. Miss Reynolds (who, it has been said, used herself to paint portraits with such exact imitation of her brother’s defects and avoidance of his beauties, that everybody but himself laughed at them) thought it marvellous that so much dignity