conspiracy by which the happiness of Angelica
Kauffmann was blasted.  In Smith's
Nollekens and his Times there is a silly
bit of improbable scandal about the fair
painter.  In Knowles's Life of Fuseli we
learn in half-a-dozen meagre lines that that
eccentric genius was introduced to Madame
Kauffmann on his first coming to England,
and that he was very nearly becoming
enamoured of her; but that this desirable
consummation was prevented by Miss Mary
Moser, daughter of the keeper of the Royal
Academy (appropriately a Swiss), becoming
enamoured of him.  Stupid, woeful Mr.
Pilkington has a brief memoir of Angelica.
Wolcot, better known as Peter Pindar,
once, and once only, alludes to her.  In
Chalmer's Biographical Dictionary there is a
notice of Angelica about equal, in compass
and ability, to that we frequently find of a
deceased commissioner of inland revenue
in a weekly newspaper.  In the vast
catalogue of the Museum Library I can only
discover one reference to Angelica Kauffmann,
personally, that being a stupid epistle to her,
written in seventeen hundred and eighty-one
by one Mr. G. Keate.  I have been thus
minute in my English researches, in order to
avoid the imputation of having gone abroad,
when I might have fared better at home.  I
might have spared myself some labour too;
for my travels in search of Angelica in foreign
parts have been tedious and painful.  That
which M. Artaud, in that great caravanserai
of celebrities the Biographie Universelle, has
to say about her is of the dryest; and a
Herr Bockshammer, a German, from whom I
expected great things, merely referred me to
another A. Kauffmann, not at all angelical;
but connected with a head-splitting treatise
on the human mind.

I will try to paint my poor Angelica.
Calumny, envy, biographers who lie by their
silence, cannot deny that she was a creature
marvellously endowed.  She was a
painter, a musician; she would have made
an excellent tragic actress; she embroidered;
she danced; she was facund in expression,
infinite in variety; she was good, amiable,
and virtuous:  full of grace, vivacity, and wit.
Fancy Venus without her mole; fancy
Minerva without her ægis (which was, you may
be sure, her ugliness).  Fancy Ninon de l'Enclos
with the virtue of Madame de Sévigné.
Fancy a Rachel Esmond with the wit of a
Becky Sharp.  Fancy a woman as gifted as
Sappho, but not a good-for-nothing; as
wise as Queen Elizabeth, but no tyrant;
as brave as Charlotte, Countess of Derby,
but no blood-spiller for revenge; as
unhappy as Clarissa Harlowe, but no prude; as
virtuous as Pamela, but no calculator; as
fair as my own darling Clementina, but no
fool.  Fancy all this, and fancy too, if you
like, that I am in love with the ghost of
Angelica Kauffmann, and am talking nonsense.

She was born (to return to reason) in the
year seventeen hundred and forty-one, at
Coire, the capital of the Grisons, a wild and
picturesque district which extends along the
right bank of the Rhine to the Lake of
Constance. She was baptised Marie-Anne-
Angélique-Catherine. Angelica would have been,
enough for posterity to love her by.  But,
though rich in names, she was born to poverty
in every other respect.  Her father, John
Joseph Kauffmann, was an artist, with
talents below mediocrity, and his earnings
proportionately meagre.  He came, as all
the Kauffmanns before him did, from
Schwarzenburg, in the canton of Voralberg,
and appears to have travelled about
the surrounding cantons in something nearly
approaching the character of an artistic
tinker, mending a picture here, copying
one there, painting a sign for this gasthof
keeper, and decorating a dining-room for that
proprietor of a château.  These nomadic
excursions were ordinarily performed on foot.
ln one of his visits to Coire, where he was
detained for some time, he happened, very
naturally, to fall over head and ears with
a Protestant damsel named Cléofe; nor
was it either so very unnatural that Fraulein
Cléofe should also fall in love with him.  She
loved him indeed so well as to adopt his
religion, the Roman Catholic; upon which
the church blessed their union, and they were
married. Hence Marie-Anne-Angelique-
Catherine, and hence this narrative.

If Goodman Kauffmann had really been a
tinker, instead of a travelling painter, it is
probable that his little daughter would very
soon have been initiated into the mysteries
of burning her fingers with hot solder, drumming
with her infantile fists upon battered
pots, and blackening her young face with
cinders from the extinguished brazier.  We
all learn the vocation of our parents so early.
I saw the other hot, sunny evening, a fat
undertaker in a fever-breeding street near
Soho, leaning against the door-jambs of his
shop (where the fasces of mutes' staves are),
smoking his pipe contentedly.  He was a lusty
man, and smoked his pipe with a jocund face;
but his eyes were turned into his shady shop,
where his little daughter—as I live it is true,
and she was not more than nine years old—
was knocking nails into a coffin on tressels.
She missed her aim now and then, but went
on, on the whole, swimmingly, to the great
contentment of her sire, and there was in his
face—though it was a fat face, and a greasy
face, and a pimpled face—so beneficent an
expression of love and fatherly pride, that I
could forgive him his raven-like laugh, and
the ghastly game he had set his daughter to.

So it was with little Angelica.  Her first
playthings were paint-brushes, bladders of
colours, maul-sticks, and unstrained
canvases; and there is no doubt that on many
occasions she became quite a little Joseph,
and had, if not a coat, at least a pinafore of
many colours.