There is a curiously sane and optimistic note about all the Reynolds portraits. Even where he does not succeed--in painting portrait groups, for example--the fault is merely one of composition, he keeps to his earliest intention of expressing what is best in the sitter, and seeing him "with dilated eye"; he is merely unable to set several figures upon the same canvas. Save for ever increasing deafness and a little trouble with sister Frances, who keeps house for him and is not cast in the same placid mould, nothing occurs to disturb the even tenor of his happy life. Intellect rules emotions--either he has no feeling for intrigue or he can keep his emotions beyond the reach of prying eyes. Even his relations with Angelica Kaufmann, now in her twenty-eighth year, and an original member of the Royal Academy, baffle the censors who would fain discover that she was the painter's mistress. "His heart has grown callous by contact with women," says one of his contemporaries or biographers, and this may well be so. Angelica Kaufmann was one of the women who attract men, and there is no evidence to show that Reynolds was more than a good friend to her. Long years later, when the visits to Leicester Square could have been no more than a memory, she attracted Goethe, who used to read to her some of his unpublished work. The painter's self-control has made some of his biographers angry; they write as though fearful lest, on account of his virtue, there shall be no more cakes and ale, and ginger shall no longer be hot in the mouth. If they could but catch him tripping, he might return to the highest place in their affections, and all would be forgiven. There is something so human in this attitude that it becomes almost tolerable, though it is hard to avoid a smile when one finds that the subject of the relations between Sir Joshua and Miss Kaufmann have been discussed quite seriously by foreign writers. If Sir Joshua could have made the lady a better artist, if it can be shown that he saved her from being a worse one than she was, there is something to write about; the subject of their personal relations cannot possibly concern the world at large, and is not worth a tithe of the ink that has been spilt in attack or defence. [Illustration: PLATE VI.--PORTRAIT OF TWO GENTLEMEN. (In the National Gallery) This picture was painted in 1778 and presented to the National Gallery in 1866 by Mrs. Plenge. The gentleman on the right examining the prints and holding a violin in his right hand is one J. C. W. Bampfylde, the one on the left is the Rev. George Huddersford who was for some years a painter and a pupil of Sir Joshua.] III