THE LIFE AND DISCOURSES OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY. First American Edition. HUDSON, OHIO: SAWYER, INGERSOLL AND COMPANY. HUDSON, OHIO: Stereotyped by WILLIAM H. SHAIN, at the Hudson Stereotype Foundry. Printed by SAWYER, INGERSOLL & Co., Steam Press, Pentagon. W •3R46 LIFE OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, BY ALLAN CUNNINGHAM. JOSHUA, the son of the Reverend Samuel Reynolds, and Theophila Potter, his wife, was the tenth of eleven children, five of whom died in infancy. He was born at Plympton, in Devonshire, on Thursday, July 16th, 1723, three months before the death of Sir Godfrey Kneller; "thus perpetuating," say some of his biographers, "the hereditary descent of art." This descent of talent had a better security for continuation than the life of a new-born child. Wilson was ten years old, and Hogarth had already distinguished himself. The admirers and disciples of Sir Joshua imagined that the mantle of art remained suspended in the air, from the day of Kneller's ascent, and refrained from descending upon other shoulders till their favorite rose to manhood and eminence. The pride of Reynolds would have resented in life this compliment from his friends—he who shared in imagination the imperial robe of Michael Angelo, would have scorned the meaner mantle of Godfrey Kneller. Few men of genius are allowed to be born or baptized in an ordinary way; some commotion in nature must mark the hour of their birth, some strange interposition must determine their name -the like happened to young Reynolds. His father, a clergyman of the established church, gave him the scriptural name of Joshua, in the belief, says Malone, who had the legend from Bishop Percy of Dromore, that some enthusiast of the same name might be induced to give him a fortune. The family motives, as recorded by Northcote, had more of the shrewdness of calculation in them. An uncle, from whom something might be expected, lived in the neighborhood, and he was a Joshua. Owing to the haste or carelessness of the clergyman, the church may claim some share in the marvels which accompanied his birth; he was baptized in one name, and entered in the parish register in another-the Joshua of all the rest of the world is a Joseph at Plympton. The Reverend Samuel Reynolds, a pious and indolent man, who performed, without reproach, his stated duties in religion, and presided with the reputation of a scholar in the public school of Plympton, seems to have neglected, more than such a parent ought, the education of his son. It is true that the boy, inspired (as Johnson intimates in his Life of Cowley) with Richardson's Treatise on Painting, appeared, like Hogarth before him, to be more inclined to make private drawings than public exercises; and it is likewise true that his father rebuked those delinquencies, on one occasion at least, by writing on the back of a prohibited drawing, "Done by Joshua out of pure idleness." But transient rebuke will not atone for habitual inattention-the education which we miss in youth we rarely obtain in age, and a good divine and a learned parent could not but know how much learning adorns the highest and brightens the humblest occupation. Northcote, the pupil, and lately the biographer of Reynolds, reluctantly admits his master's deficiency in classical attainments. But his incessant study of nature and practice in art-his intercourse with the world at large, and familiarity with men of learning and ability, accomplished in after life much of what his father had neglected in youth. "The mass of general knowledge by which he was distinguished," says Northcote, was the result of much studious application in his riper years." "I know no man," observed Johnson to Boswell, "who has passed through life with more observation than Sir Joshua Reynolds." 66 His father, however, conceived that he had acquired learning sufficient for the practice of physic-for to that profession he was originally destined. He observed to Northcote that if such had been his career in life, he should have felt the same determination |