long years of indolence, extravagance, and vice. Disease was secretly wearing away his originally powerful constitution. His face, once so full of intelligence and beauty, had become deformed and bloated with intemperance. His old friends looked coldly, upon him. Brilliant powers of conversation and fascinating address no longer characterized the faded wit and shattered debauchee. The Prince Regent, for whom he had so often sacrificed his interest and honor, left him "naked to his enemies." All the mortifications which could result from wounded pride and vanity, and the sense of decaying intellect, thickened upon him. His ruin was swift and sure. His creditors seized upon every thing which the pawnbroker had not already taken. Even Reynolds's portrait of his first wife as Saint Cecilia passed from his possession. In the spring of 1815, he was arrested and carried to a sponginghouse, where he was retained two or three days. His life sufficiently shows that his sense of shame was not quick, but he was deeply humiliated at this arrest, feeling it as as "a profanation of his person."

He appeared

And now came the misery of his last scene. to feel that his life was drawing to a close. To some sharp remonstrances from his wife on his continued irregularities, he replied in an affecting letter. "Never again," he wrote, "let one harsh word pass between us during the period, which may not perhaps be long; that we are in this world together, and life, however clouded to me, is spared to us. His last illness soon followed. Even his dying bed was not free from the incursions of writs and sheriffs. He was ar

rested, and would have been taken away in his blankets, had not his physician threatened the officer with the consequences of committing murder. At last, on the seventh of July, 1816, in his sixty-fifth year, he died.

Then came the mockery of a splendid burial. Dukes, royal and noble, bishops, marquesses, earls, viscounts, right honorables, emulously swelled the train of his funeral. France," said a French journalist at the time, "is the place for an author to live in, and England the place for him to die in." In the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, the only spot remaining unoccupied was reserved for the body of him whose death-bed was not safe from the sheriff's writ. Tom Moore, in a fine strain of poetical indignation, published just after Sheridan's death, thus cuttingly refers to the noble lords who "honored" the funeral :

"How proud they can press to the funeral array

Of him whom they shunned in his sickness and sorrow! How bailiffs may seize his last blanket to-day,

Whose pall shall be held up by nobles to-morrow! The task of lightening the misery of Sheridan's last hours was left to such commoners as Samuel Rogers, Thomas Moore, and good Doctor Bain.

The moral of Sheridan's life lies on the surface, and we shall not risk any commonplaces of ethical horror in commenting upon its hollowness and its sins. The vices for which he was distinguished are generally reprobated, and their position in the scale of wickedness is sufficiently marked; but they are not the darkest kind of vices. We are not of that number who select him from his contemporaries, and expend upon his follies and errors the whole strength of their indignation. Allowing him to have been as bad as his nature would allow, we believe he was a much better man than many of his contemporaries who are commonly praised as virtuous. The man who brings misery upon himself and his family by intemperance and sloth is justly condemned, but he is innocent compared with one who, from bigotry or lust of power, would ruin or injure a nation. George the Third is praised as a good king; but the vices of Sheridan's character were mere peccadilloes compared with the savage vices which raged and ruled in the heart of his Majesty. In a moral estimate which included all grades of sin, Sheridan would compare well even with Lord North, William Pitt, or Spencer Perceval, with all their social and domestic merits. The American war and the war with France originated, or, at least, were continued, in a spirit which approaches nearer to the diabolical than the sensuality of Sheridan ; and we feel little disposed to chime in with that morality which passes over all the rats and liberticides, the servile politicians and selfish statesmen, the bad and bigoted spendthrifts of blood and treasure, during a whole generation, to hurl its heaviest anathemas upon one poor, weak, volatile, brilliant, and hard-pressed roué.

But while we thus remember that there are natures which have continued to indulge darker passions than he ever dreamed of, without coming under the ban of either historian or moralist, and while we therefore have little sympathy with one class of Sheridan's judges and critics, we do not join in the absurd sentimentality of another class, who strive hard to NO. 138.

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class his case among the infirmities and calamities of genius. The sources of his errors were not those which have sometimes hurried large and unregulated minds into evil, and there is something ridiculous in placing him by the side of the Otways, the Savages, the Chattertons, the Burnses, and the Byrons. With regard to his calamities, there is hardly another instance in literary history of a man who enjoyed so much fame with such moderate powers, and who was enabled to run so undisturbed a career of sensuality from manhood to within three years of his death. What commonly goes under the name of enjoyment of life he had in full measure, not only without the check which comes from means limited by honest scruples, but almost without the remorse with which conscience usually dashes unhallowed pleasure. And with respect to the desertion of which he complained in the last years of his life, it was, as far as regarded his political connections, the result of his political treachery; and as his personal friendships sprang from the fellowship of vice rather than feeling, he had no right to expect that the rakes and good-fellows, his companions of the bottle and the debauch, would be the bankers of his poverty, or the consolers of his dying hours.

ART. IV. - Modern Painters. By a Graduate of Oxford. First American from the third London Edition, revised by the Author. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 1847. 12mo. pp. 422.

THIS is a book written by a well-educated man, a close and intelligent observer of nature, familiar with the best works of art, and himself a practical, though, as we understand him, not a professional, artist; thus seeming to combine qualifications for writing well on this difficult subject, which are not often found united. That he is not a professional artist does not the less entitle him to our attention; such persons being very apt to become too much absorbed in the mere difficulties of their pursuit to preserve the breadth of mind necessary to comprehend the whole subject. The best works on art that were ever written are Sir Joshua Reynolds's desultory Notes

and Discourses; and he was by profession only a portraitpainter. In historical and fancy compositions he was little more than an amateur. He painted them experimentally, and more from the love of it than for gain. His profound knowledge of high art lay in theory and observation; his practice in it was not enough to narrow his mind down to any particular system or manner. He saw and appreciated what was good in all manners, and excused nothing because it flattered his vanity or his indolence. Though he could not have written as he did if the pencil had not been more familiar to his hand than the pen, neither could he have done so if he had spent in the solitude of his studio, and in the severe practice that Art demands of her followers, the time which he passed in galleries and in the society of the most intellectual men of his day.

It cannot be denied, therefore, that the author before us, if he announces any thing new, however startling, is entitled to a respectful hearing; and if, upon examination, he appears to have lent his advantages to the support of errors, or to have endeavoured upon no sufficient ground to shake wellestablished opinions, he ought the more carefully to be corrected.

The book is written with great ability of manner, though in a style somewhat loose and declamatory, and infected with the modern cant which uses new phrases to cover up obscure meaning. It contains many very acute and frequently novel observations upon nature, and much sound discussion of the general principles of art. But the sole purpose of the book, to which all this is sometimes subordinate and sometimes quite irrelevant, seems to be to maintain the strange proposition, that the old landscape-painters of the seventeenth century were very mean and ordinary artists, and that Mr. Turner and certain other modern English painters are immeasurably their superiors, and have indeed carried the art almost to perfection. So fiercely is it devoted to this object, and so extravagantly does it condemn on the one hand and exalt on the other, that it is difficult to believe it to be done in good faith. It would seem, that, if we acquit the author of being, from whatever motives, a mere personal partisan, we must regard him, notwithstanding his evident knowledge of the subject, as wholly deficient in a true feeling for art. It is difficult to come to either of these conclusions. It will be safer and more candid to leave him on the middle ground of prejudice;

and we think we perceive to what this is to be attributed, as we shall presently have occasion to state. That the attempt is a total failure will be the immediate judgment of all those who have seen and understood the works thus condemned; and even those who have not, however they may at first be carried away by the confident tone and plausible exaggerations of the author, would find, on a review of the book, that its conclusions rest on no basis but unsupported statements, contradicted by the uniform judgment of all who have seen those works before him. They would find many things palpably inconsistent, many of which it requires no knowledge of art to perceive the absurdity, some things absolutely false in fact, and nothing which can justly lay claim to be considered as any new discovery upon which opinions so old should be overthrown.

But most persons to whom the subject is not already familiar will rest satisfied with the first impression made by such a book. It has already acquired great popularity, having passed through three editions in England, and been reprinted here. We happen to know, too, that it has excited more attention than it deserves among persons interested in the arts. In Europe, where the works of the old masters continually speak for themselves, such a book can do no lasting harm; but here, where those works are unknown except to those who see them abroad, unfrequently or at long intervals, there is danger that the effect may be more permanent. It leads the public mind in the way in which it is already too apt to go, especially among ourselves. We are not too willing admirers of antiquity in any thing, for long past time seems to us to belong to the nations of the Old World, and the present to be more fitly represented by our own; the ignotum pro_magnifico is not the error to which we are most prone. In this very matter of the supremacy of the old masters, there has always been a rebellious doubt among those who have never seen their works, and a suspicion that those who have seen them praise them for that reason. It is a very natural doubt; for, in the first place, nobody has ever yet given any good reason why there should have been so much better artists in those days than in our own; though we think a careful examination of the difference in the condition of society and the extent of literary education at the first of these two periods and at any subsequent time would furnish an easy and very