a niece of Reynolds: the same gentleman also possesses the last portrait of the artist by himself, together with many other interesting specimens of his pencil. In 1747 Reynolds repaired again to London, and took lodgings in St. Martin’s Lane, then and long afterwards the favourite residence of artists. In 1749 he sailed to the Mediterranean, by the invitation, and in the company of Captain (afterwards Lord) Keppel. Reynolds spent two months in Minorca, where he painted several portraits of military and naval officers, and proceeded thence, by way of Leghorn, to Rome. He was fully alive to the sources of inspiration which this city of the arts contained. In the midst of his enthusiasm, however, he was secretly humiliated by discovering in himself an absence of all relish for the grand works of Raffaelle in the Vatican. Richardson had inspired him with the most exalted admiration of Raffaelle; and whatever may be supposed, Reynolds could not be entirely unacquainted with the subjects and designs of the works alluded to. Indeed, in some notes of his own that have been preserved, he only confesses a feeling of disappointment, and afterwards says, “In justice to myself, however, I must add, that though disappointed and mortified at not finding myself enraptured with the works of this great master, I did not for a moment conceive or suppose that the name of Raffaelle, and these admirable paintings in particular, owed their reputation to the ignorance and prejudice of mankind: on the contrary, my not relishing them, as I was conscious I ought to have done, was one of the most humiliating circumstances that ever happened to me. I found myself in the midst of works executed upon principles with which I was unacquainted; I felt my ignorance, and stood abashed; all the indigested notions of painting which I had brought with me from England, where art was in the lowest state it had ever been in (indeed it could not be lower), were to be totally done away and eradicated from my mind.” The union of candour and docility with good sense, which the above account evinces, was the means of emancipating Reynolds from the taste or fashion of the day. Instead of enrolling himself among the scholars of Pompeo Battoni, as he was strongly recommended to do before his departure from England by his kind patron Lord Edgecumbe, he endeavoured during the practice of his art to penetrate the principles on which the great works around him, particularly those of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, were produced. His general theory will be found embodied in his writings, and if his principles sometimes appear to be pushed too far, we may perhaps attribute it to the wish to counteract certain prevailing errors among his contemporaries. It is a general notion that, considering the difference in style between the paintings of Reynolds and those of the great models he professes to admire (Michael Angelo received his more