Many artists remain painters all their lives. Meet them in a studio or at a private view and they are illuminating; talk about another lying outside their immediate interests and they are dumb, or worse, for some talk without saying anything, as though they were mere politicians. Perhaps we have no right to complain of this lack of mental dimensions, but it is permissible to note with pleasure the few cases in which an artist reveals himself as an accomplished man of the world. Reynolds would never have been content to be nothing more than a painter, and he chose his friends so wisely that the living served him as well as the dead. If the great artists of Italy had shed light upon his path in one direction, what did he not owe to the men of his own generation, whose society must have been a source of inspiration to any intelligent man? Dr. Johnson himself could only have been inspiring company, even though we may think in our heart of hearts that the benefit of the inspiration was not without serious drawbacks. Reynolds enjoyed also the intimate friendship of Garrick, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and Burke, he consorted with many other men who made some mark in the world of thought, and in this atmosphere the extraordinary receptivity of his mind must have served him to great advantage. He had human weaknesses to live down, and it is to his credit that he conquered all or most of them. Like so many honest Englishmen, there was a touch of the snob about him--witness his correspondence with Lord Edgcumbe during the first visit to the Continent. He was not without jealousy, as may be seen from his pettish condemnation of the work of Liotard, the miniature painter and pastellist, and his references to Gainsborough and Romney, whose success and accomplishments galled him not a little. He was vulgar, until he learned refinement from the distinguished people with whom he was brought into contact--witness the gilded coach and gaudy liveries he bought when he established himself in Leicester Square, the coach in which his unfortunate sister Frances was compelled to drive in order that the man in the street might stare open-mouthed and talk about her brother. There is hardly a "Lion Comique," or a lady of the music halls drawing prime minister's salary for songs blatant or obscene, who would commit such an offence to-day, and against these lapses from taste Sir Joshua's acquaintance with the best minds of his day failed to save him. Perhaps the atmosphere of Leicester Square in the eighteenth, as in the twentieth, century was a little theatrical. Of course the faults of a man and the merits of his work are distinct and stand apart from one another, but we are too apt to look at Reynolds the man in the light of Goldsmith's epitaph, and it is the failing of popular biography to supply popular people with a measure of moral equipment that would make a saint self-conscious. It is far more interesting to see great men as