In another instant there entered a fresh, almost chubby-faced gentleman, with a dint in his nether lip, and an ear-trumpet in his hand. He was not without a certain dapperness in the unexceptionable brown coat and spotless ruffles, which he had substituted for his painting-coat and plain cuffs. He was the briskest of gentlemen, the most obliging of geniuses who ever kept sitters in good humour and under control, by the very ease of his dignity in bearing with their airs and oddities. The contemporary of the glorious, careless good-fellow Gainsborough, of Romney in his arrogant, one-sided power, and later of Opie, the most self-taught and the most self-asserting painter among them—Sir Joshua beat them all. It may be true that his art was pervaded with an artificial, aristocratic flavour, and that he made a little lady of his strawberry girl, and modern English my lords of every historical personage who passed under his pencil. Painters may feel it their duty, from their watch-tower of technical knowledge, to impress on the world their grieved conviction, that the president of the old Academy, so widely cultivated, so full of sense and acumen, in addition to his professional ability, and to the industry which “never passed a day and lost a line,” the chosen friend of the most public-spirited men of his time—yet painted deliberately for a single generation. He was, according to his brethren, wilful and regardless of the destructive nature of the pigment which he used, so that they produced a certain effect to last his time. His accusers point in proof of their charge to the fading lines and cracking canvas of the very works of which all Englishmen are proud. So be it, if it must be so; we have still the poetry (let some hold it fantastic) of the Tragic Muse, the gallant heroism of Keppel, the thoughtful benevolence of Johnson, the broad archness of Nelly O’Brien; and we have following on the dainty playfulness of “Pick-a-back” a long train of fresh and delicate, lovely and stately, English maids and matrons, with Sir Joshua’s quaint sweet children bringing up the rear. In Lady Bell’s day there was no thought, unless it were among the chemically skilled, that these softly glowing, wonderfully blended colours would wane, or the fine surface give way. Sir Joshua was regarded as the quintessence of inspired and courtly painters, treading in the footsteps of Van-dyck.