worse one than she was, there is something to write about; the subject of their personal relations cannot possibly concern the world at large, and is not worth a tithe of the ink that has been spilt in attack or defence.

III

We owe an apology to the new President whom we left standing upon the threshold of the Royal Academy, which opened its doors with a first exhibition of one hundred and thirty-six pictures! The memory of this commendable modesty should not be allowed to fade in these days when canvas stretches by the acre over the long-suffering walls of Burlington House, when artists appear not singly but in battalions and the cry is “still they come.” In April 1769 Reynolds received the honour of knighthood and this seems to have put the finishing touches to his social claims. Henceforward he painted fewer portraits; the records of 1771 credit him with a mere seventy, and though this figure may make modern men gasp, it compares but feebly with the one hundred and eighty-four that stood to the credit of an earlier year. The President increased the number of his clubs, enlarged his dining circle, became more and more dignified, mellow, gracious, and urbane, farther removed than before from the turmoil that was going on in art circles of the less successful men around him. Having all the cream he required, he was not concerned with quarrels about skimmed milk. Some of his biographers think that Romney was beginning to compete with the master, and that this competition accounts for the diminishing number of his sitters, but it is reasonable to suppose that a man who can make his own prices and is beyond the reach of want may regard seventy portraits as a very satisfactory output for one year, when he has other duties to fulfil and is by temperament a lover of the world’s good things. Fortune could have given him nothing more, unless the hearing that passed in the old days of the pilgrimage to Rome had been restored, and if such a miracle could have been vouchsafed, the painter’s splendid indifference to matters that annoy quick, nervous temperaments might have passed, and the latter days might have been clouded. If wisdom at one entrance was nearly shut out, there was plenty left, as may be gathered from a study of the Discourses. Their vitality is proved by the fact that new editions are still called for, and many members of the more modern schools of painting declare that Reynolds saw some aspects of painting with twentieth-century eyes.

In 1773 Plympton remembered its famous artist and elected him mayor, an honour that touched him nearly. One cannot help thinking that it was more to him even than the degree of Doctor of Civil Law, conferred in the same year by Oxford University de honoris causa, though this too helped him to paint his own portrait in flamboyant style, and the artist loved colour. One portrait of himself was sent to the town of Plympton and hung between two pictures that were “old masters” according to the leading lights of the Corporation. In truth, they were two of Sir Joshua’s own early works, and from this simple story we may learn that artists come and artists go, but the mental calibre of corporations is constant and not subject to change. He sent another picture of himself to the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence, where so many Masters stand self-committed to canvas in pictures that do not err upon the side of making the sitters lack distinction.

The next eight years were uneventful, save for the fact that the President was doing some of his best work and enjoying life in the fullest and most complete fashion imaginable. Nearly all who knew him loved him, and to the great majority of men and women he was just and kind. For a man so completely free from emotion and self-revelation, Reynolds claimed a very large circle of intimates, and it was hardly an age of introspection. Men confessed themselves to their Maker but not to their friends; the formalities of life and speech presented an effective barrier to the emotions, even the stage was as artificial and pompous as it could be. One may perhaps acknowledge an uneasy feeling that David Garrick himself would make a very small impression upon a latter-day audience, if he confronted it with the mid-eighteenth-century style of speech and action.

In 1780 the Academy Exhibition was transferred from Pall Mall to Somerset House, where it was destined to remain until 1838, the year of its removal to the National Gallery, where it stayed thirty-one years on the way to Burlington House. Among the portraits painted by the President in that year was one of General Oglethorpe, who, according to the “Table Talk” of Samuel Rogers (quoted by Sir Walter Armstrong), could tell of the days when he had shot snipe in Conduit Street. In the following year Reynolds painted the wonderful picture of the Ladies Horatia, Laura, and Maria Waldegrave, one of the few groups whose arrangement is beyond cavil. Few will look in vain to that picture for any of the finest qualities of Sir Joshua’s art. He had very little to learn, though in the summer and autumn of 1781 he visited the Low Countries, staying in Bruges, Brussels, The Hague, Amsterdam, and other cities, and showing himself strangely indifferent to the pictures of Franz Hals, though these might have been presumed to appeal to any portrait painter. His records and impressions of the journey were set down most carefully, and are preserved; they show that success had not impaired discernment, and that the painter was responsive to most of the thoughts that stir educated visitors to the Dutch galleries to-day.

In 1782, the year in which Romney painted his first picture of Mistress Hart, afterwards Lady Emma Hamilton, Reynolds sat to his great rival Gainsborough, now at the height of his fame and in the last years of his life; the two men disliked each other, and the picture was never completed. Some say that Reynolds made a hasty remark about his fixed determination not to paint Gainsborough’s portrait in return, and some mischief-maker carried the words to Gainsborough. Others think that the touch of palsy or slight attack of paralysis that came to Sir Joshua about the time of the sitting, brought it to a close. There must be more than this underlying the true story of the affair, for though a visit to Brighton and to Bath restored the President’s health, the sittings were not resumed, even when Reynolds wrote to say he was ready to sit again. In 1783 Sir Joshua sent ten portraits to the Academy, while Gainsborough, exhibiting there for the last time, sent twenty-five pictures, including the famous panels of George III., and his children, now in Windsor. But Reynolds added to his fame in this year, for he painted the portrait of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. Then he paid another visit to the Low Countries, to find with regret