nate in that general weakness in the untaught mind, which seeks in strange practices a remedy for fancied future or actual present evils. The most enlighted nations are nevertheless full of prejudices. There are as many in the Rue St. Denis and the Marais, as there are on the banks of the Duna and Lake Peypus. In another letter I shall give some particulars of the ancient Religion of the people of the Baltic provinces, and compare it with Scandinavian Mythology. I am, Sir, &c. COUNT DE BRAY. "ON ROBERT BLOOMFIELD. BIOGRAPHY. within his reach, and whatever newspapers he could obtain: even at that N the 19th August died at Shef- early age he wrote a small poem, which ford, in Bedfordshire, in his 57th he sent for insertion to the Editor of year, Robert Bloomfield, Author of the the London Magazine, and had the Farmer's Boy," &c. &c. His con- pleasure of seeing it in print. He next stitution, naturally weak, had of late turned his attention to poetry during years become alarmingly impaired; the hours of relaxation from toil, and every fresh attack left him still weaker; composed many pieces; even in the the last, it was feared, had he survived, midst of his occupation; he had also a would have fixed him in a state of men- taste for music, playing very decently tal aberration, to which himself and on the violin; his imagination, howevdearest friends must have preferred his er, was heated with the fine descripdeath!" Such is the brief announce- tions which he had read in the Poets of ment of the departure of one of those celebrity, particularly Thomson; and, Heaven-gifted minds, not of every day disengaged from the bustle and care of growth; of a Poet, whose unpresuming a city, he planned and executed his but undisputed claims raised him sud-Farmer's Boy," a work, which, as a denly from obscurity to fame, from the descriptive poem, possesses original pressure of penury to comparative genius and a happy facility in compowealth, and from mechanical toil to sition. Robert married about this literary ease. Robert Bloomfield was time, and entered into trade. His poborn in 1766, in the county of Suffolk. em fell into the hands of Mr. Lofft, who He was one of six children of a tailor revised it, and prepared it for the press, in middling circumstances, who was bestowed on the author his protection, not enabled to give him more than a printed it at his own expense, and wrote common education, for the acquirement the preface. On its first appearance of which he was indebted to his mother, it was highly approved of, and passed who kept a school, and gave him all through many editions in a very short the instruction which she was able to time; it fully established the claim of bestow. He learned to read as soon the author to the title of Poet, and as he could speak, and his mother hav- stamped his name with the honour of ing lost her husband, remarried when genius. Of all Bloomfield's published Bloomfield was not more than seven works, no volume has alone so much years old. At the age of eleven he was interest as his " Wild Flowers," which obliged to accept the menial office of a was dedicated to his only son, Charles. farmer's boy, to attend the workmen in The Poet's last production is entitled the field. In the intervals of his la- «Hazlewood Hall," a Village Drama, bours, that native genius, which sooner in Three Acts; and the Preface is daor later bursts the bonds of slavery, led ted from the place of his dissolution, so him to peruse such books as came recently as the 12th of April last. TABLE-TALK.-OLD AGE OF ARTISTS. MR. NOLLEKENS (New Mon.) DIED the other day at the age of eighty, and left 240,000 pounds behind him, and the name of one of our best English sculptors. There was a great scramble among the legatees, a codicil to a will with large bequests unsigned, and that last triumph of the dead or dying over those who survive -hopes raised and defeated without a possibility of retaliation, or the smallest use in complaint. The king was at first said to be left residuary legatee. This would have been a fine instance of romantic and gratuitous homage to Majesty, in a man who all his life-time could never be made to comprehend the abstract idea of the distinction of ranks or even of persons. He would go up to the Duke of York, or Prince of Wales, (in spite of warning), take them familiarly by the button like common acquaintance, ask them how their father did; and express pleasure at hearing he was well, saying, "when he was gone, we should never get such another." He once, when the old king was sitting to him for his bust, fairly stuck a pair of compasses into his nose to measure the distance from the upper lip to the forehead, as if he had been measuring a block of marble. His late Majesty laughed heartily at this, and was amused to find that there was a person in the world, ignorant of that vast interval which separated him from every other man. Nollekens, with all his loyalty, merely liked the man, and cared nothing about the king (which was one of those mixed modes, as Mr. Locke calls them, of which he had no more idea than if he had been one of the cream-coloured horses)-handled him like so much common clay, and had no other notion of the matter, but that it was his business to make the best bust of him he possibly could, and to set about it in the regular way. There was something in this plainness and simplicity that savoured perhaps of the hardness and dryness of his art, and of his own peculiar severity of manner. He conceived that one man's head differed from another's only as it was a better or worse subject for modelling, that a bad bust was not made into a good one by being stuck upon a pedestal, or by any painting or varnishing, and that by whatever name he was called, "a man's a man for a' that." A sculptor's ideas must, I should guess, be somewhat rigid and inflexible, like the materials in which he works. Besides, Nollekens' style was comparatively hard and edgy. He had as much truth and character, but none of the polished graces or transparent softness of Chantry. He had more of the rough, plain, downright honesty of his art. It seemed to be his character. Mr. Northcote was once complimenting him on his acknowledged superiority-"Ay, you made the best busts of any body!" "I don't know about that," said the other, his eyes (though their orbs were quenched) smiling with a gleam of smothered delight-" I only know I always tried to make them as like as I could!" I saw this eminent and singular person one morning in Mr. Northcote's painting-room. He had then been for some time blind, and had been obliged to lay aside the exercise of his profession; but he still took a pleasure in designing groups, and in giving directions to others for executing them. He and Northcote made a remarkable pair. He sat down on a low stool (from being rather fatigued), rested with both hands on a stick, as if he clung to the solid and tangible, had an habitual twitch in his limbs and motions, as if catching himself in the act of going too far in chiselling a lip or a dimple in a chin; was bolt-upright, with features hard and square, but finely cut, a hooked nose, thin lips, an indented forehead; and the defect in his sight completed his resemblance to one of his own masterly busts. He seemed, by time and labour, to "have wrought himself to stone." Northcote stood by his side→→ all air and spirit, stooping down to speak to him. The painter was in a loose morning-gown, with his back to the light; his face was like a pale fine now looking for his snuff-box-now piece of colouring; and his eye came out and glanced through the twilight of the past, like an old eagle looking from its eyrie in the clouds. It has been remarked that artists, or at least academicians, live long. It is but a short while ago that Northcote, Nollekens, West, Flaxman, Cosway, and Fuseli were all living at the same time, in good health and spirits, without any diminution of faculties, all of them having long passed their grand climacteric, and attained to the highest reputation in their several departments. NORTHCOTE, THE PAINTER. Of all the Academicians, the painters, or persons I have ever known, Mr. Northcote is the most to my taste. It may be said of him truly, "Age cannot wither, nor custom stale His infinite variety." Indeed, it is not possible he should become tedious, since, even if he repeat the same thing, it appears quite new from his manner, that breathes new life into it, and from his eye, that is as fresh as the morning. How you hate any one who tells the same story or anticipates a remark of his-it seems so coarse and vulgar, so dry and inanimate! There is something like injustice in this preference-but no! it is a tribute to the spirit that is in the man. Mr Northcote's manner is completely extempore. It is just the reverse of Mr. Canning's oratory. All his thoughts come upon him unawares, and for this reason they surprise and delight you, because they have evidently the same effect upon his mind. There is the same unconsciousness in his conversation that has been pointed out in Shakspeare's dialogues; or you are startled with one observation after another, as when the mist gradually withdraws from a landscape and unfolds objects one by one. His figure is small, shadowy, emaciated; but you think only of his face, which is fine and expressive. His body is out of the question. It is impossible to convey an adequate idea of the naïvéte, and unaffected, but delightful ease of the way in which he goes on-now touching upon a picture alluding to some book he has been reading-now returning to his favourite art. He seems just as if he was by himself or in the company of his own thoughts, and makes you feel quite at home. If it is a member of Parliament, or a beautiful woman, or a child, or a young artist that drops in, it makes no difference; he enters into conversation with them in the same unconstrained manner, as if they were inmates in his family. Sometimes you find him sitting on the floor, like a school-boy at play, turning over a set of old prints; and I was pleased to hear him say the other day, coming to one of some shipwreck" That is the grandest men putting off in a boat from a and most original thing I ever did!" This was not egotism, but had all the beauty of truth and sincerity. The print was indeed a noble and spirited design. The circumstance from which it was taken happened to Sir Harry Englefield and his crew. He told Northcote the story, sat for his own head, and brought the men from Wapping to sit for theirs; and these he had arranged into a formal composition, till one Jeffrey, a conceited but clever artist of that day, called in upon him, and said, "Oh! that common-place thing will never do, it is like West; you should throw them into an action something like this."-Accordingly, the head of the boat was reared up like a sea-horse riding the waves, and the elements put into commotion, and when the painter looked at it the last thing as he went out of his room in the dusk of the evening, he said that "it frightened him.” He retained the expression in the faces of the men nearly as they sat to him. It is very fine, and truly English; and being natural, it was easily made into history. There is a portrait of a young gentleman striving to get into the boat, while the crew are pushing him off with their oars; but at last he prevailed with them by his perseverance and entreaties to take him in. They had only time to throw a bag of buiscuit into the boat before the ship went down ; which they divided into a biscuit a day for each man, dipping them into water which they collected by holding up their handkerchiefs in the rain and squeezing it into a bottle. They were out sixteen days in the Atlantic, and got ashore at some place in Spain, where the great difficulty was to prevent them from eating too much at once, so as to recover gradually. Sir Harry Englefield observed that he suffered more afterwards than at the time -that he had horrid dreams of falling down precipices for a long time after that in the boat they told merry stories, and kept up one another's spirits as well as they could, and on some complaint being made of their distressed situation, the young gentleman who had been admitted into their crew remarked, "Nay, we are not so badly off neither, we are not come to eating one another yet!"-Thus, whatever is the subject of discourse, the scene is revived in his mind, and every circumstance brought before you without affectation or effort, just as it happened. It might be called picturetalking. He has always some pat allusion or anecdote. A young engraver came into his room the other day, with a print which he had put into the crown of his hat, in order to crumple it, and he said it had been nearly blown away several times in passing along the street. "You put me in mind," said Northcote, "of a bird-catcher at Plymouth, who used to put the birds he had caught into his hat to bring them home, and one day meeting my father in the road, he pulled off his hat to make him a low bow, and all the birds flew away!" Sometimes Mr. Northcote gets to the top of a ladder to paint a palm-tree or to finish a sky in one of his pictures; and in this situation he listens very attentively to any thing you tell him. I was once mentioning some strange inconsistencies of our modern poets; and on coming to one that exceeded the rest, he descended the steps of the ladder one by one, laid his pallet and brushes deliberately on the ground, and coming up to me, said "You don't say so, it's the very thing I should have supposed of them: yet these are the men that speak against Pope and Dryden." Never any sarcasms were so fine, so cutting, so careless as his. The grossest things from his lips seem an essence of refinement: the most refined become more so than ever. Hear him talk of Pope's Epistle to Jervas and repeat the lines— «Yet should the Graces all thy figures And breathe an air divine on every face; FUSELI, THE PAINTER. Mr. Fuseli's conversation is more striking and extravagant, but less pleasing and natural than Mr. Northcote's. He deals in paradoxes and caricatures. He talks allegories and personifications, as he paints them. You are sensible of effort without any repose-no careless peasantry-no traits of character or touches from nature-every thing is laboured or overdone. His ideas are gnarled, hard, and distorted, like his features-his theories stalking and straddle-legged, like his gait-his projects aspiring and gigantic, like his gestures-his performance uncouth and dwarfish, like his person. His pictures are also like himself, with eye-balls of stone stuck in rims of tin, and muscles twisted together like ropes or wires. Yet Fuseli is undoubtedly a man of genius, and capable of the most wild and grotesque combinations of fancy. It is a pity that he ever applied himself to painting, which must always be reduced to the test of the senses. He is a little like Dante or Ariosto, perhaps : but no more like Michael Angelo, Raphael, or Correggio, than I am. Nature, he complains, puts him out. Yet he can laugh at artists who "paint ladies with iron lap-dogs :" and he describes the great masters of old in words or lines full of truth, and glancing from a pen or tongue of fire. I conceive any person would be more struck with Mr. Fuseli at first sight, but would wish to visit Mr. Northcote oftener. There is a bold and startling outline in his style of talking, but not the delicate finishing or bland tone that there is in the latter. Whatever there is harsh or repulsive about him is, however, in a great degree carried off by his animated foreign accent and broken English, which give character where there is none, and soften its asperities where it is too abrupt and violent. FLAXMAN, THE SCULPTOR. COSWAY, THE PAINTER. - imagination. His was the crucifix that Abelard prayed to-a lock of Eloisa's hair-the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckingham-the first finished sketch of the Jocunda— Titian's large colossal profile of Peter Aretine-a mummy of an Egyptian king-a feather of a Phoenix-a piece of Noah's Ark. Were the articles authentic? What matter?-his faith in them was true. He was gifted with a second-sight in such matters: he believed whatever was incredible. Fancy bore sway in him; and so vivid were his impressions, that they included the substance of things in them. The agreeable and the true with him were one. He believed in Swedenborgianism-he believed in animal magnetism Flaxman is another living and eminent artist, who is distinguished by success in his profession, and by a prolonged and active old age. He is diminutive in person, like the others. I he had conversed with more than know little of him, but that he is an ele- one person of the Trinity-he could gant sculptor, and a profound mystic. talk with his lady at Mantua through This last is a character common to many some fine vehicle of sense, as we speak other artists in our days-Lutherbourg, to a servant down-stairs through a conCosway, Blake, Sharp, Varley, &c. duit-pipe. Richard Cosway was not who seem to relieve the literalness of the man to flinch from an ideal propotheir professional studies by voluntary sition. Once, at an Academy dinner, excursions into the regions of the pre- when some question was made whethternatural, pass their time between er the story of Lambert's Leap was sleeping and waking, and whose ideas true, he started up, and said it was; are like a stormy night, with the clouds for he was the person that performed driven rapidly across, and the blue sky it:-he once assured me that the kneeand stars gleaming between! pan of King James I. in the ceiling at Whitehall was nine feet across (he had measured it in concert with Mr. Cipriani, who was repairing the figures)he could read in the Book of the Revelations without spectacles, and foretold the return of Bonaparte from Elbaand from St. Helena! His wife, the most lady-like of Englishwomen being asked in Paris what sort of a man her husband was, made answer--" Toujours riant, toujours gai." This was his character. He must have been of French extraction. His soul appeared to possess the life of a bird; and such was the jauntiness of his air and manner, that to see him sit to have his halfboots laced on, you would fancy, (by the help of a figure) that, instead of a little withered elderly gentleman, it was Venus attired by the Graces. His miniature and whole-length drawings were not merely fashionable-they were fashion itself. His imitations of Michael Angelo were not the thing. Cosway is the last of these I shall mention. At that name I pause, and must be excused if I consecrate to him a petit souvenir in my best manner; for he was Fancy's child. What a fairy palace was his of specimens of art, antiquarianism, and virtù, jumbled altogether in the richest disorder, dusty, shadowy, obscure, with much left to the imagination, (how different from the finical, polished, petty, modernised air of some Collections we have seen!) and with copies of the old masters, cracked and damaged, which he touched and retouched with his own hand, and yet swore they were the genuine, the pure originals. All other collectors are fools to him: they go about with painful anxiety to find out the realities:-he said he had them-and in a moment made them of the breath of his nostrils and of the fumes of a lively |