At the British Museum there used to be officials called Attendants. They were appointed by the Lord Chancellor, the Primate and the Speaker, and usually were men of whom they had some personal knowledge. One of these Attendants had been a servant of a former Primate, and he was like a father to the students, taking care of their drawings and easels, and giving them much good advice. I happened to be dining with some friends in Portland Place, and was amazed to see him officiating as butler there in his most archiepiscopal style. (The butler of the house had got the gout, and he had been called in.) When I saw him next, he spoke apologetically--“Not a very satisfactory dinner, sir, I fear, when I had the pleasure of meeting you last week. All aspics and jellies, sir, and there should have been lamb cutlets.” One of my friends had a particularly pompous butler. A girl gave my friend a kitten, and he called it Cissy after her. Missing the kitten one morning, he inquired, “Where’s Cissy?” The butler bowed. “I beg your pardon, sir, you may not have observed it, but Cissy is a Lady’s name, and the cat is a Gentleman cat.” At a sale at Christie’s in 1903 I saw a painting that attracted me, and I bought it, and hung it in the Tallet here. It was catalogued only as a portrait, 30 × 25, English School, and “the property of a gentleman”; but it appears to be a portrait of James Barry (1741-1806) painted by himself, when he was young. There are other portraits of him painted by himself at other times of life: one at the National Portrait Gallery, another at the South Kensington Museum, another at the Society of Arts, and probably others elsewhere. He also painted himself as Timanthes in the _Victors at Olympia_, one of his big pictures at the Society of Arts; and it seems clear to me (though Boswell did not see it) that Dr Johnson was thinking of Pliny’s criticism of Timanthes, when he made his celebrated criticism on Barry’s pictures there, 26 May 1783--“Whatever the hand may have done, the mind has done its part. There is a grasp of mind there which you will find nowhere else.” Pliny had said, “cum sit ars summa, ingenium tamen ultra artem est.”