All over England and Scotland portrait painters flourished at this time. There were so many English artists that in 1768 the Royal Academy was founded, with Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first president. It was to the students of the Royal Academy that he delivered his Discourses upon Art, setting forth the principles which he judged to be sound. He was an indefatigably hard worker until within two years of his death in 1792. All classes of men esteemed and regretted him, clouded though his intercourse with them had been by the deafness from which he suffered during the greater part of his life. Goldsmith, the author of the _Vicar of Wakefield_, wrote this character 'epitaph' for him: Here Reynolds is laid, and to tell you my mind, He has not left a wiser or better behind. His pencil was striking, resistless and grand; His manners were gentle, complying and bland; Still born to improve us in every part, His pencil our faces, his manners our heart. To coxcombs averse, yet most civilly steering When they judged without skill, he was still hard of hearing. When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios and stuff, He shifted his trumpet and only took snuff. By flattery unspoiled ... The end is missing, for while Goldsmith was versifying so feelingly about his friend, death overtook the writer, eighteen years before the subject of the epitaph. CHAPTER XIV TURNER I wonder which of you, if seeing this picture for the first time, will realize that you are looking at the old familiar Thames? It would seem rather to be some place unknown except in dreams, some phantasy of the human spirit that we ourselves could never hope to see. And yet, in fact, this is what Turner actually did see one evening as he was sailing down the Thames to Greenwich with a party of friends. Suddenly there loomed up before his eyes the great hull of the _Temeraire_, famous in the fight against the fleet of Napoleon at Trafalgar, and so full of memories of glorious battle, that it was always spoken of by sailors as the _Fighting Temeraire_. At last, its work over as a battleship, or even as a training-ship for cadets, dragged by a doughty little steam-tug, it was headed for its last resting-place in the Thames, to be broken up for old timber. As the _Temeraire_ hove in sight through the mist, a fellow-painter said to Turner: 'Ah, what a subject for a picture!' and so indeed it proved. The veteran ship, for Turner, had a pathos like the passing of a veteran warrior to his grave. [Illustration: THE FIGHTING TEMERAIRE From the picture by Turner, in the National Gallery, London]