departs this life, the portrait disappears, . and the face of his fucceffor is in due time hung up in its ftead. This, you will fay, is treating their old Sovereign a little unkindly, and paying no very expenfive compliment to the new; it is not fo œconomical, however, as what was practifed by a certain perfon. I fhall not inform you whether he was a Frenchman or an Englishman, but he certainly was a courtier, and profeffed the higheft poffible regard for all living monarchs; but confidered them as no better than any other piece of clay when dead. He had a full length picture of his own Sovereign in the principal room of his houfe; on his majefty's death, to fave himself the expence of a fresh body, and a new fuit of ermine, he employed, a painter to brush out the face and periwig, and clap the new King's head on his grandfather's fhoulders; which, he declared, were in the most perfect preservation, and fully fully able to wear out three or four fuch heads as painters usually give in thefe degenerate days. The Italians, in general, very seldom take the trouble of fitting for their pictures. They confider a portrait as a piece of painting, which engages the admiration of nobody but the perfon it reprefents, or the painter who drew it. Those who are in circumftances to pay the best artifts, generally employ them in fome fubject more univerfally interesting, than the representation of human countenances ftaring out of a piece of canvas. Pompeio Battoni is the best Italian painter now at Rome. His tafte and genius led him to hiftory painting, and his reputation was originally acquired in that line; but by far the greater part of his fortune, whatever that may be, has flowed through a different channel. His chief chief employment, for many years past, has been painting the portraits of the young English, and other strangers of fortune, who vifit Rome. There are artifts in England, fuperior in this, and every other branch of painting, to Battoni. They, like him, are feduced from the free walks of genius, and chained, by intereft, to the fervile drudgery of copying faces. Beauty is worthy of the moft delicate pencil; but, gracious heaven! why fhould every periwig-pated fellow, without countenance or character, infift on seeing his chubby cheeks on canvas? "Could you not give a little expreffion "to that countenance ?" faid a gentleman to an eminent English painter, who showed him a portrait which he had just finished. "I made that attempt already," replied. the painter; "but what the picture gained "in expreffion, it loft in likeness; and, by "the time there was a little common fenfe "in the countenance, nobody knew for "whom it was intended. I was obliged, "therefore, to make an entire new pic"ture, with the face perfectly like, and "perfectly meaningless, as you fee it." Let the colours for ever remain, which record the last fainting efforts of Chatham; the expiring triumph of Wolf; or the indecifion of Garrick, equally allured by the two contending Mufes! But let them perish and fly from the canvas, which blind felf-love spreads for infipidity and uglinefs! Why should pofterity know, that the firft genius of the age, and those whose pencils were formed to speak to the heart, and delineate beauteous Nature, were chiefly employed in copying faces? and many of them, faces that imitate humanity fo abominably, that, to use Hamlet's expreffion, they seem not the genuine work of Nature, but of Nature's journeymen. To this ridiculous felf love, equally prevalent among the great vulgar and small, fome fome of the best painters in France, Germany, and Great Britain, are obliged for their subsistence. This creates a fufpicion, that a tafte for the real beauties of painting, is not quite fo univerfal, as a fenfibility to their own personal beauties, among the individuals of thefe countries. And nothing can be a ftronger proof of the important light in which men appear in their own eyes, and their fmall importance in thofe, of others, than the different treatment which the generality of portraits receive, during the life, and after the death, of their conftituents. During the first of thefe periods, they inhabit the finest apartments of the houfes to which they belong; they are flattered by the guefts, and always viewed with an eye of complacency by the landlord. But, after the commencement of the fecond, they begin to be neglected; in a fhort time are ignominiously thrust up to the garret; and, to fill up the measure of their affliction, they finally are thrown. out of doors, in' the most barbarous man ner, |