should resume his studies with new fervour. But that hour came never; he returned to London, and sank down on a couch helpless and dejected: there he lay for five long years, experiencing no alleviation and no change, unless being wheeled from one room to another on his sofa can be called a change. Baillie, Carlisle, Lynn, and Warren visited him in vain: he was wasting gradually away; but his death was hastened by one of those melancholy mistakes of which we sometimes read: a chemist, from whom Owen obtained his prescriptions, labelled the medicines so that the unfortunate patient swallowed opium instead of an aperient draught; he fell into a stupor, lingered a few hours, and expired 11th of February, 1825, in the fifty-sixth year of his age.

Those who were admitted to Owen's fireside relate that he was kind, hospitable, and goodhumoured; spoke his mind without much consideration or choice of fine words; and, on several occasions, had shown much manliness, and not a little courage. At school, when he was stabbed severely in the thigh by one of his companions, he had the fortitude to be silent, and the good feeling to conceal his mishap in order to screen the other from punishment; and once when his brother, Major Owen, had fallen into a river, he plunged in and saved his life at the risk of his own. In his genius he was rebuked somewhat by those painters who had started before him in the race. The man who lives by recording living faces must always calculate the chances of such a disadvantage: more active or more

courtly rivals may run away with princes, ministers of state, and lords and ladies of high degree; and if so, he must either find heroes and heroines among the more ordinary part of the population, or throw his palette into the Thames. He who monopolises the king and those whom the king delighteth to honour, robs Laban of his gods, and he must have them back or perish.

HARLOW.

GEORGE HENRY HARLOW was born in St. James's Street, London, 10th of June, 1787. The story of his birth was truly and touchingly told by one who witnessed his funeral. "I shall never forget what I saw some thirty years ago, when I called and enquired for a worthy friend, long my companion in Canton. I was introduced to a lady with five very young girls round her knees, and a boy-babe in her arms; she received me in silence, and not without tears; the mournings which she wore were for my friend, her husband, who had been dead six months; the infant in her arms, a month old or scarcely more, was the eminent painter whom we have this day borne to the grave."

His father was a merchant, who had lived many years in the East; his widow, young, wealthy, and handsome, gave all her thoughts to her husband's memory and the education of her children; and her only son, as might be expected, had a large share of her solicitude. He attended the classical seminary of Dr. Barrow, in Soho Square; then that of Roy, in Burlington Street; and was also some time at Westminster school. Of his proficiency as a scholar there

He was not un

are contradictory accounts. willing in after life to talk of his attainments in classic lore; but he might do so with some safety, for he only alluded to it amongst artists. The learning of the youth could not be otherwise than moderate who left school at sixteen, and whose mind even before that early date had been much occupied with other studies.

The love of painting came on Harlow early; and living as he did in the midst of exhibitions and galleries, his mind was already disciplined to a greater extent than he was aware of when he took the pencil in his hand. The painter bred in the solitude of the country has to train up his mind among the rough, wild beauties of unregulated nature; the painter bred in the city studies the well-considered scenes of the most consummate masters, and has the culled poetry of nature served up to him in every gallery. The first acquires skill slowly; the other avails himself of the fruits of fancy not his own, and soon becomes dexterous in the tricks of colour, and cunning in the arts of posture and grouping. The attempts of Harlow were so promising that his mother, having confirmed her own opinion by the examination of friends, resolved that he should devote himself to art; and, with more eagerness than taste, put him under the care of Henry de Cort, a landscape painter from Antwerp, of humble abilities and supreme conceit, who undertook to teach him the secrets of the profession. In such a school nothing but enthusiasm such as Harlow's could have prospered: he acquired knowledge sufficient to see that he

was wasting his time; and, undertaking now to judge for himself, sought instruction in the studio of Drummond the portrait painter. "Here," says one of his biographers," he pursued his art with an ardour from which even amusements could not seduce him."

He had studied something more than a year with this new master, when he grew desirous of profiting by another instructor. One account represents him making a tour of the painters' studios with his mother, for the purpose of determining on the most worthy; while another says, that this was decided for him by the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, through whose interposition he was placed under the care of Lawrence. That he might have made that choice for himself, is, however, very likely; young as he was, he could not fail to see much in the works of the future president akin to his own feelings; besides, it was natural that he should desire to study with the most distinguished,—and Lawrence had already asserted his superiority. His admission to the painting rooms of his new master was coupled with conditions, which sound strangely in ears unacquainted with the practice of artists. He paid one hundred guineas yearly as a pupil; and for this Harlow "was to have free access to Sir Thomas's house at nine o'clock in the morning, with leave to copy his pictures till four o'clock in the afternoon, but to receive no instruction of any kind." If such were the terms on which he commenced, they were, if we can credit the accounts of some of the biographers, very soon altered. "Sir Thomas," says Smith,