the Whig lords who were engaged in keeping
the king within bounds of his duty as the
sovereign of a free people. And so, while in
conversation with the world easy and accommodating,
as fitted his calling, Reynolds always was
himself a very honest English artist, who never
began a new picture without resolving that he
would try to make it his best,—not daunted by
the bad features of a sitter, " at any rate," he
said, " there is nature;" or by any difficulties
of costume; " at any rate," he said, " there is
light and shade." When his word carried much
weight he wisely taught students in art that
genius could achieve little without patient
unremitting labour. And even in his daily
conversation Reynolds lived, after all, in a very
republican way among people of every grade,
so little in awe of the fine folk who came to
dine with him, that, after his sister ceased to
keep house and take thought for the replacing
of his broken plates and wine-glasses, he would
look good-temperedly at an archbishop scrambling
for a plate, and make the most solemn of
dukes feel that he was dining in Liberty Hall,
under the presidency of an artist who didn't
care whether his fish was half cold when he
got it. If so, he got only what he deserved for
his want of proper energy in mastering the little
difficulties that interposed themselves between
him and the fish.

Joshua Reynolds was a Devonshire man,
born in the ancient borough of Plympton Earl,
and as long as he lived he loved Devonshire
above all counties, and Plympton above all
towns. In the fulness of his success as Sir
Joshua, the favourite of London, he accounted
it nearly the most precious of his honours to
be made alderman first, and then mayor of his
native town. His father, Samuel Reynolds,
was the master of the Plympton Grammar
School, not the incumbent of Plympton. His
grandfathers, both on the father's and the
mother's side, were clergymen of the English
Church, two of his uncles also were in holy
orders, and after one of them, rector of Stoke
Charity in Hampshire, the painter-to-be was
christened Joshua. Samuel, the schoolmaster,
Joshua's father, was a learned, simple-minded
man, whom his friends likened sometimes to
Fielding's Parson Adams. He and his wife
Theophila had eleven children, of whom six
survived. Of those which died one had been
dropped out of window by a careless nursemaid.
Mr. Reynolds, the father, dabbled in medicine,
and used to lecture to his children upon divers
subjects; it was remembered that at one
domestic lecture he had produced a human skull.
And he had poetry enough in him to produce
these lines to his wife Theophila:

               When I say The,
               You must make tea;
               But when I say Offy,
               You must make coffee.

One of his maxims, which his son Joshua as
a boy set down upon paper among rules of
conduct for himself, was, that " the great principle
of being happy in this world is, not to mind or
be affected with small things." Joshua doubtless
took to this the more readily because it
agreed with his constitutional temper. He
could see as from afar, or as not seeing, the
little vexations with which many folks contrive
to embitter life for themselves and those about
them who have less than Reynolds's placidity.
Another favourite maxim of his father's was,
that "if you take too much care of yourself,
Nature will cease to take care of you;" which
is another axiom of the philosophy that teaches
how to take life easily and quietly.

Samuel Reynolds's children, like most other
children, had great pleasure in drawing. His
elder sisters were young adepts. For want of
paper and pencils they used to draw with burnt
sticks on the whitewashed walls of a long
passage in the schoolhouse, and little Joshua's
artistic performances earned him from his sisters
the name of the Clown. Yet, at eight years old,
he had studied the Jesuit's treatise on Perspective
to such good purpose, that he drew the
schoolhouse according to rule—no easy matter,
as its upper part is supported on a range of
pillars. " Now this," said his father,
"exemplifies what the author of the Perspective asserts
in his preface, that by observing the rules laid
down in this book a man may do wonders; for
this is wonderful."

Another book that influenced the boy, and,
it has been said, even made Reynolds a painter,
was Jonathan Richardson's Treatise on Art.
Richardson was not a good painter, and his
book did not teach principles, but he wrote
nobly on the dignity of art, and of the capabilities
of Englishmen—who had produced among
themselves a Shakespeare, a Milton, and a
Newton—to produce also the next of the great
painters from among themselves. Reynolds afterwards
told Malone how Richardson's treatise had
so delighted and inflamed his young mind, " that
Raffaelle appeared to him superior to the most
illustrious names of ancient or modern time."
The boy copied from illustrations in his father's
books, particularly the engravings in Dryden's
edition of a translation by many hands of
Plutarch's Lives, and a Dutch copy of Jacob Cats'
book of Emblems, from which he derived suggestions
afterwards for several of his pictures. When
twelve years old, Joshua Reynolds painted his
first portrait in oil. His subject was a jolly moon-
faced clergyman, the Reverend Thomas Smart,
who lived as tutor in the family of Richard
Edgcumbe, afterwards the first Lord Edgcumbe.
The picture is still extant, and the story of it is
that the hopeful young Dick Edgcumbe, whom
the reverend gentleman instructed, got young
Reynolds to sketch the tutor surreptitiously,
while he was preaching in his church at Maker,
on the borders of the Mount Edgcumbe grounds,
and that they then ran down to the sea, and in
a boat-house at Cremyll beach, under Mount
Edgcumbe, spread a canvas, which was part of
an old boat sail, whereon Joshua did the parson
in oil with the common paint used in shipwright's
painting sheds. So began the professional