to see plays when he was a boy.

"He would go to

the Red Bull [the playhouse in Clerkenwell] and when the man cried to the boys, 'Who'll go and be a devil? he shall see the play for nothing,'-then would he go in, and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see plays." A very good school, Master Collier would say, to teach him the life he often led in the Devil's Court!

IV.

On Engraved Portraits, and theiq
Inscriptions.

(CONTINUED.)

E smile at the hyperbolic encomia lavished

W

on great men, but more frequently on

the illustrious obscure, by contemporaries,

but the examples I have given are perhaps outdone by the following, which appears at the foot of a portrait, dated 1649:

"If Rome unto her conqu❜ring Cæsars raise
Rich obelisks to crown their deathless praise;
What monument to thee must Albion rear
To show thy motion in a brighter sphere?
This Art's too dull to do't; 'tis only done
Best by thyself; so lights the world the sun.
We may admire thy face, the sculptor's art,
But we are extasy'd at th' inward part."

These be brave words, my masters! Do you ask to what "conqu'ring Cæsar" they apply? They were written in praise of one Richard Elton, who wrote a book on the "Art Military," the "inward part” of which not having read, I can the better perhaps

believe in the "extasy'd" condition of those who have. But perhaps you will object to this that it is only the obscurity of the person panegyrized, that makes the wonder! Here then is "higher game!" This is from a monody, pumped from the lowest depths of Bathos, on the death of Queen Elizabeth. The whole is preserved by Camden, and considered by him to be truly doleful:'

"The Queen was brought by water to Whitehall;

At every stroke the oars did tears let fall:

More clung about the barge; fish under water

Wept out their eyes of pearl, and swome blind after.
I think the barge-men might with easier thighs
Have row'd her thither in her people's eyes;

For howsoe'er, thus much my thoughts have scan'd,
Sh'ad come by water, had she come by land."

I am afraid, despite the grief of her subjects, their tears would scarcely have floated the Queen to her haven of rest, unless she could have been as easily accommodated as a personage of whom a poet of the next century thus sings:

"An ancient Sigh he sits upon

Whose memory of sound is long since gone."

Portraits in old times very frequently were the means of perpetuating, by the introduction of an emblem or incident in the back-ground, as a battle, a large book with title displayed, an axe and block, &c.

some extraordinary event in the life or death of the person represented. Thus, when Sir Henry, the father of the Sir Thomas Wyatt, now known to us principally by his poems, was confined in the Tower by Richard III., it is recorded that he was preserved from starvation there by a cat, that used to bring him a pigeon every day from a neighbouring dovecot. This is detailed fully in a MS. volume of family papers quoted by Mr. Bruce in the Gentleman's Magazine, and, it is added, "Sir Henry, in his prosperity, for this would ever make much of cats, as other men of spaniels or hounds, and perhaps you shall not find his picture anywhere but, like Sir Christopher Hatton with his dog, with a cat beside him!" Notwithstanding the implied great number of the portraits of Sir Henry Wyatt, I am not aware that there is one now to be seen, and certainly there is no old print of him, so that it would be difficult to identify his cat. The portrait of Sir Richard Whittington, by Elstracke, was published at first with his hand resting on a skull, but Dick Whittington without his cat was not to be submitted to by the public, so the skull was converted by the magic of the burin into a cat, and all was well. Some collectors, however, of the present day prefer

an impression of the print, when they can get it, with the skull. There are very few known.

The Earl of Southampton, (Henry Wriothesly), the patron of Shakespeare, is painted with his cat, his companion in the Tower, now in the Duke of Portland's collection. And in the picture of Sir Henry Lee, in the same collection, is a dog, which, 66 "though not previously a favourite, yet, on one occasion saved his master from the hands of an assassin. Hence the point of the motto inscribed on the painting,

'More faithful than favoured !'"

As regards 'background' battles, naval fights, &c. French portraits certainly, for their number and prominence, bear away the palm from English portraits. Hogarth has satirized the French style. of his time in the portraits he has represented in his pictures of the Marriage à la Mode. There is a portrait of the Count de Maurepas, after Van Loo, by Petit, which is quite a model specimen of this sort of work, and it is interesting for the audacity of the flattery. Jean Frederic Phelypeaux, Count de Maurepas, was born in 1701. In the seventeenth year of his age he was named Secretary of State, by the favour