strengthened by industry and observation into ability, but had denied him genius. Sir Joshua, who was always very kind to him, told him as much on his return; and, quoth he, "In the grand style, Josh, you'll never do any thing, and if you did, you'd very likely starve, like poor Jem Barry; but stick to portraits, and you may always make sure of a leg of mutton for dinner and a guinea in your pocket." That same kind Providence which had withheld from Joshua Quedlingburg the sacred flame of genius, had given him a very liberal share of common sense. He took his great patron's advice: rented a house in Great Ormond Street; laid out most of his ready cash in furnishing it handsomely; hung out his sign, that is to say, a brass-plate with his name upon it, as a respectable British citizen and tax-payer should do; and settled down as a painter of portraits in oil,-ten guineas the half, and twenty guineas the whole length. He got on very well indeed. The harum-scarum, improvident young painter-fellows about Soho used to sneer at him as a curmudgeon and a money-grubber, and nicknamed him Joseph Surface, from a character in Mr. Sheridan's new comedy; but he kept steadily on, and at the end of ten years' portrait-painting could demand forty guineas for a kitcat, and seventy for a whole-length. He became an Associate early, and before the end of the century was named R.A. His Majesty, to whom he was presented by Alderman Boydell (in the year of his mayoralty), was pleased to say of him that he was a thoroughly respectable man; and Queen Charlotte sent him a snuff-box of Chelsea-ware, value about two-and-threepence, but which was rendered priceless by the fact of her own royal fingers having been frequently plunged therein, in testimony of her approbation of the manner in which he had depicted old Madam Schwellenburgh, her majesty's chief dresser. The envious sneered at him, as the man who ate up Sir Joshua Reynolds' leavings. It is true that but very few dukes and duchesses, admirals, generals, or lord chancellors ever found their way to his studio in Great Ormond Street. Kitty Fisher had probably never heard of him. Perdita would have disdained to permit him to paint her lap-dog. On good Mr. Wilberforce (who was a great patron of our respectable R.A.) making interest with Charles Fox to sit to Quedlingburg, that brilliant but disorderly genius declined, but said that his black footman was quite at the gentleman's service. So, too, pompous Mr. John Kemble, the tragedian, when solicited to come in his Coriolanus toga to Great Ormond Street, replied loftily that he did not consider the man fit to paint the portrait of a candle-snuffer, or of the hireling who played the hinder legs of the elephant in the pantomime at Sadler's Wells. This was very unwholesome; but Mr. Joshua Quedlingburg, R.A., shrugged his shoulders, and went on painting portraits and making money. He drew well, painted with solidity, made a liberal use of handsome colours, and finished with great nicety. In regimentals, barristers' wigs, corporation robes, and parsonic cassocks, he was eminently successful. He was the first artist who made a marked feature of a cut orange and a silver standish, with a stick

of bright-red sealing-wax in a tray; and caused the portraits even of Quakers to look splendid, by adding heavy gold fringes and tassels to the curtain behind the column. Josh Quedlingburg was a man who, above all things, knew what he was about.

In the first decade of the present century, Mr. Quedlingburg, R.A., was a very, very old gentleman, quite bald-headed, and almost as deaf as his illustrious, and now deceased, friend Sir Joshua; but with an eye and a hand that had lost little of their brightness and firmness. Mayors, recorders, town-clerks, colonels of militia, aldermen, City widows, bankers' wives, and heads of colleges, were his principal clients. He worked in a steady, mechanical way; receiving his money in advance, exacting a certain number of sittings, neither more nor less, from his customers, and employing two or three young men of talent in a back-room to fill-in his backgrounds, and work up his silver standishes and cut oranges. He had been churchwarden half a dozen times. He liked serving on the grand jury, and in all political trials was to be depended upon as a true-blue Church-and-State man. I believe it was Lord Ellenborough who, in conversation with Mr. Baron Garrow, passed on him the high encomium that "little Quedlingburg was as ready to hang a Jacobin as a picture;" and his zeal on behalf of the Crown and Government gave rise to the sneer of a good-for-nothing set of young fellows,-who used the Mirabeau's Head, in Gerrard Street, Soho,-that his three-quarter heads ought to be called "hung, drawn, and quartered ones." I have been told that Mr. Quedlingburg's obstinacy on the right side was the main cause of the conviction of Colonel Despard, and that if King George the Third had not gone out of his wits, he would certainly have knighted the loyal painter. But he was never destined to add a title more elevated than that of Royal Academician to his name, and continued Mr. Quedlingburg to the end of the chapter. He was quite contented. He had plenty of money; nay, had even attained that summum bonum or a perfectly respectable man's aspirations, a few New-River shares. He was a bachelor. Early in life 'twas said that he had lost his heart to Mrs. Angelica Kauffman, the Lady Academician, with whom it was very much the fashion to go starkstaring mad in love about; but whether his affections had been blighted or not, Mr. Quedlingburg kept his secret with sage reticence, and confided the care of his house, and the head of his table, to an ancient maiden sister.

The world, I think, was getting into its teens, and all the town were talking of the famous victory of Salamanca, won by the troops of Lord Wellington over those of the Corsican ogre, usurper, upstart, and Jacobin, Buonaparte, as it was then the custom in true-blue Church-and-State circles to call Napoleon the Great,-when one morning Caesar, Mr. Quedlingburg's black footman,-not the sable servitor recommended as a sitter by impertinent Mr. Charles James Fox,-announced a lady, desirous of seeing the Academician in private. Painters, like lawyers and doctors, need no written letters of introduction. The credentials which their clients

bring with them are quite sufficient; for they are of gold. So old Mr. Quedlingburg, with whom business was rather slack just then, received his lady-visitor with his usual amæne courtesy, and inclined his eartrumpet favourably towards her.

She was a very handsome woman,-tall, erect, majestic, and just the least in the world leaning towards embonpoint. Her chin, like a wavering celibatarian, seemed scarcely to have made up its mind whether to be single or double, and had effected a temporary compromise by being rounded to exquisite plumpness. She had very beautiful chesnut hair and very flashing hazel eyes, and she was clad in the deepest, the most fashionable, and, of course, the most expensive, mourning.

"Widow, now?" mused Mr. Quedlingburg to himself, as he nursed his knee, after rising to salute the lady, and scanned her out of the corner of his little gray eyes. "Wants to surprise number two with her portrait, perhaps. Double-baiting the hook, I call that. Husband's been dead a long time, though; no weeds."

"Sir," said the lady, raising her voice to sonorous pitch, for the Academician had warned her of his partial surdity,-"I have come to you, as the most sensible and conscientious portrait-painter in London-"

The old gentleman bowed in acknowledgment of the compliment.

"As a man totally destitute of imagination or fancy, and who degrades every poetical type presented to him into the most prosaic of realities, and yet to whose powers of conjuring up that which he has never seen I am about to appeal."

The Academician first winced, and then looked slightly hurt at the very uncompromising tone of the handsome lady's criticism, but ended by staring with amazement at the paradox she uttered.

"I have tried Beechey; I have tried Harlowe, Romney, Lawrence, Westall, and Mrs. Mee," the handsome lady went on; "and at last, and in despair, I have come to you. What is your price for a full-length portrait, half life-size?"

"A hundred guineas, madam," answered the Academician, giving the lady a handsel of a new tariff he had just mentally resolved upon. "You shall have two hundred, if the portrait pleases me."

“

"My rule is, always-" the painter was beginning.

"I am aware of it,-payment in advance. Here are two bank-bills, one for a hundred, the other for five pounds. The remaining hundred guineas shall be paid you on completion of the work."

"Your ladyship is too kind," the gratified artist said, slipping the crisp notes into his fob.

"I am no lady," his interlocutor, with sudden sharpness, exclaimed. "I am the most miserable woman in the world." And she burst into a passionate flood of tears.

"Mad, perhaps?" cogitated the painter; "or run away from her husband, or he from her? Lady Townley, or else Mrs. Haller."

"Are you willing to undertake the portrait ?" the lady resumed, drying her eyes.

"Most certainly, madam. It is one of yourself, I presume."

"No, no, no," sobbed the lady, bursting into tears again, and wringing her hands. "There is no need to preserve the semblance of this wretched form. It is my son's portrait I am wishful for,-my only, only, best-beloved son!"

"Alive or dead, ma'am?" asked the painter, rubbing his eyes too, for the lady's manner was most heartrending.

"He is dead."

"Doesn't matter at all, madam," the Academician soothingly observed. "In these terrible war-times, these little mementoes are often required from persons in my profession. Have you a cast of his face?"

"Alas, no! He fell, wrapping the colours of his regiment round his breast, at the battle of Salamanca."

"Well, we must get on as well as we can without it. No doubt you have plenty of miniatures, chalk-drawings, profiles cut in black paper, and the like."

"I have not one scrap or vestige of the limner's craft to give you as a guide; not even a lock of his hair; nothing beyond his beloved image engraven on my heart."

"Dear, dear me !" the painter interposed, with a puzzled air; "that does make the matter more difficult than I anticipated. Real working in the dark, indeed. What was he like, madam ?"

"He was like me," the lady replied, with majestic calmness.

“Then he must have been a very handsome fellow" Mr. Quedlingburg half said, when a haughty look from the lady checked him.

"In mien, in stature, in complexion, in feature, in expression, he was the image of his most unhappy mother," the lady continued; "but he was a hundred times nobler and gentler and comelier than she." And she wept with renewed bitterness.

Vouchsafing further explanations, Mr. Quedlingburg was informed that his defunct subject had been an ensign in a regiment of foot serving in the Peninsula; but the number of which in the Army List the lady declined to specify. It did not much matter. There were so many ensigns killed at the battle of Salamanca; and if the deceased were painted in the uniform of any regiment of the British Line, the purpose wished for, so said the lady, would be served.

In accordance with the instructions of his mysterious client, the Academician took a sketch of her features, and then set to work to transfer to canvas an embodiment of what the son of such a mother would probably be like. It was no very easy matter to transform a beautiful English matron-but one whose beauty was verging towards the passée-into an ensign in a marching regiment, and two-and-twenty years of age. But Mr. Quedlingburg was not a man to be discouraged by slight obstacles. He had a whole Lavater's physiognomy in his head. He tried, and tried

again; altered, amended, adapted, erased; and at last succeeded in producing a drawing which, he flattered himself, would satisfy his patroness.

A week elapsed before she came again. She expressed herself as infinitely pleased with the progress he had made; but had numberless alterations and improvements to suggest. To a modest hint from the Academician that his time was valuable, she responded by telling him that she had ill calculated the trouble which such an undertaking must necessarily cause him; and that she should consider the work, on completion, as by no means overpaid at the price of two hundred and fifty guineas. As further earnest, she presented him with another bank-bill for fifty pounds. Mr. Quedlingburg had never had so lucrative a commission in his life.

At the end of six visits she pronounced the outline of the features to be perfect, and then Mr. Quedlingburg went to work in real earnest to paint the portrait in oil. In consideration of the munificent honorarium he was to receive, he disdained to fill up the background with the ordinary column and curtain provided by his young men, and painted, in a most liberal fond of lurid smoke, which, with the tompion of a cannon, a bayonet stuck into the earth point upwards, and the legs of a recumbent French grenadier, furnished a sufficiently accurate representation, as times went, of the battle of Salamanca. His wardrobe-keeper, in Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane, furnished him with a complete uniform and equipments of a subaltern in the British infantry, and these were duly placed on a lay figure to be painted from. The lady took little notice of him while he was occupied with these accessories, and allowed him to bestow as much vermillion and yellow-ochre on the picture as ever he chose; but when he came to the face she watched every movement, and criticised every touch of his brush. She was evidently a lady with a will of her own, and a very strong one to boot; and all her criticisms were not complimentary.

Three times a week, for at least two months, the lady, by special arrangement with Mr. Quedlingburg, came to his studio in Great Ormond Street, and sat behind him as he painted. Too dark! too light! too heavy! Bear to the right! bear to the left!-were frequent exclamations on her part. If she was not a very artistic critic, she was certainly a most mathematical one. Sometimes, with her hands clasped before her, she would walk to and fro in the studio, softly singing to herself. At other times she would break into sobs and wailings, and with heartbroken accents dwell on the merits of her dead son; of how good, and brave, and tender, and true he was. And all this while Mr. Quedlingburg went on working steadily.

At last the portrait was finished. The lady seemed enchanted with it. She was too delighted to weep. She was radiant with smiles. She would have kissed the pictured semblance of her son's countenance, only Mr. Quedlingburg warned her that the surface was wet. She inquired what the price of the handsomest frame procurable would be; and, on the