who could beg sixteen guineas, will not give them, and so I may still have the picture."* In this expectation Walpole seems to have been disappointed. In a later letter he writes, "Liotard, the painter, is arrived, and has brought me Marivaux's picture, which gives one a very different idea from what one conceives of the author of Marianne, though it is reckoned extremely like; the countenance is a mixture of buffoon and villain. I told you what mishap I had with Crebillon's portrait; he has had the foolish dirtiness to keep it!" The angry Collector cannot however resist recording a witty repartee of the man who had so annoyed him :-" His father one day in a passion with him, said, 'Il y a deux choses que je voudrois n'avoir jamais fait, mon Catiline et vous.' He answered, 'Consolez vous, mon père, car on prétend que vous n'avez fait ni l'un ni l'autre !" * Letter to Sir Horace Mann.-July 27, 1752. VII. Portraits and Poets. T is curious how ignorant of painting poets prove themselves to be when they undertake to give instructions to painters; yet they profess so much when they criticize a painting and dub the artist Titian, Apelles, or Protogenes, as the exigences of the metre demand. It is no excuse to say that they have no idea of their instructions being carried out the proprieties must be observed.' What a farrago of nonsense is Waller's "Instructions to a painter for the Drawing of the Posture and Progress of his Majesty's Forces at Sea, under the command of His Highness Royal: together with the Battle and Victory obtained over the Dutch, June 3rd, 1665." (Sir John Durham and Andrew Marvel also had their Advices to Painters.' Marvel's "Advice to the Painter upon the coming in of the Dutch to the River and end of the war," 1667, was satirical, and made Pepys's 'heart ache to read, it being too sharp and so true!'-) "First draw the Sea; that portion, which between The greater world, and this of ours, is seen; Paint an East Wind, and make it blow away Then draw the Parliament, the Nobles met, Last draw the Commons at his Royal feet, Pouring out treasure to supply his fleet." This is by that Waller who wrote sugared sonnets to Saccharissa, and composed those verses on a Girdle that will live wherever an English maiden's waist may be spanned! We must not forget that he also wrote some verses on Van Dyck, which, in a book on Portraits, ought to be included. They are worth preserving, remembering the Painter and those elegant ladies whom Lombart and Faithorne have * King Charles II. rendered familiar to all of us, though the full charm of the originals can only be known to those who are fortunate enough to make their acquaintance at Wilton, or Knowsley, or the dozen other Van Dyck Houses, or in Lord Derby's Portrait Gallery at Kensington: "TO VANDYCK. Rare Artisan! whose pencil moves From thy shop of beauty we The heedless lover does not know Whose eyes they are that wound him so, But, confounded with thy art, Inquires her name that has his heart. Strange! that thy hand should not inspire The beauty only, but the fire: By this it would seem that Van Dyck's portrait of the lady Dorothy Sidney was only accomplished at a second attempt, the first portrait having been a failure. The young portrait painter will derive some consolation in knowing that the greatest men sometimes fail. When Sir Joshua Reynolds sent his picture of the Infant Hercules to the Empress of Russia, he said there were three pictures under it, so many had been his short-comings; and Gainsborough, in painting the portrait of Mrs. Siddons, now one of the gems of the Kensington Museum, after many ineffectual attempts to give expression to the nose (and there is much expression in a nose!) threw down his brush, exclaiming, "D-n it, there's no end to it!"-and see what trouble poor Mrs. Pepys's nose gave Mr. Hales. Was this "shop of beauty," that Waller speaks of, a particular collection of portraits assembled at the house of the Painter? Perhaps, when Lombart engraved his "Beauties" the original pictures were exhibited, in |