trils. The notion is, that people should be painted as if they were hanging like pictures on the wall; a Newgate notion, but it was Sir Joshua's. Raeburn and I have had good-humoured disputes about this: I appealed to Titian, Vandyke, &c. for my authorities; they always painted people as if they were sitting opposite to them, not on a mountebank stage or dangling on the wall." A list, with dates, of the portraits of this northern master is much to be desired; the heads which he exhibited in London amount to little more than fifty in the course of forty years' labour he must have painted many hundreds.

By his lady who survives him, Sir Henry Raeburn had two sons. The eldest, a fine youth with much of his father's genius, died at the age of nineteen. Henry, the second son, is married and has a family; he inherits of course the villa of Stockbridge, lives in the house where his father died, and has many of his works in his keeping, not the least valuable, being various heads of men of genius in science, letters, and art, with whom the great painter had lived on terms of intimacy.

HOPPNER.

JOHN HOPPNER was born in London sometime in the summer of 1759. There is a mystery about his birth, which no one has ventured to explain : all that is known with certainty is, that his mother was one of the German attendants at the Royal Palace. The King caused the child to be carefully nursed, and well educated; when he grew up, as his voice was sweet and melodious, he was made one of the choristers in the Royal Chapel. All this benevolence was misunderstood. George III. was pious and generous, and such acts of kindness became him; but slanderers were not wanting to insinuate, that his Majesty had good natural reasons for all this tenderness; and it is said some such gossips actually possessed the boy himself with a notion of very lofty parentage. I believe there is no doubt that when he grew up, he was willing enough to have it understood, that he owed something more than his nursing and education to the throne. This was most probably the mere ruse of a shrewd man, who felt how much such a surmise would help his fortune; but it received some sort of countenance from the very active patronage of the Prince of Wales, (George IV.) who supported him against the

rising fame of Lawrence and Owen, and the settled reputation of Opie, and crowded his studio with princes, peers, and fine ladies.

Of the boyish studies of Hoppner we have heard little on which we can rely. He availed himself of the advantages held out by the Royal Academy; and entering a probationer with his chalk and paper, ascended slowly and systematically through all the steps required, till, with paint on his palette, and a brush in his hand, he contended for the highest prizes of the institution. With such success did he study, and so fortunate was he in his sketches and his early attempts, that, before his twenty-fourth year, he was looked upon as one likely to become great in landscape, and who already painted heads in a way worthy of a more established name. As soon as it was safe as a matter of taste to befriend him, he found patrons, and powerful ones. Mrs. Jordan sat to him, in the character of the Comic Muse, supported by that

"goddess fair and free,
In heaven yclep'd Euphrosyne,"

to whom the artist confided the task of repelling the advances of a satyr. We know not what might be meant by this; but the work was much liked. The fair dame sat again as "Hippolite." Another was a lady of quality shadowed forth under the no very flattering name of a Bacchante; but as the colours were glowing, and the face lovely, the audacity of the name might be forgiven. Then followed the portraits of the Duke of York, of his Duchess, of the Prince of Wales, and the Duke