whom therefore these anecdotes are proud to boast of and enroll* among our artists, and who has enshrined the feeble talents of the painter in "the lucid amber of his glowing lines." The repeated name of Lady Bridgwater in that epistle was not the sole effect of chance, of the lady's charms, or of the conveniency of her name to the measure of the verse. Jervas had ventured to look on that fair one with more than a painter's eyes; so entirely did the lovely form possess his pear to observe; and of which circumstance Pope was not a little vain. In proof of his proficiency in the art of painting, Pope presented his friend Mr. Murray, with a head of Betterton the celebrated tragedian, which is now at Caen Wood. During a long visit at Holm Lacy, in Herefordshire, accompanied by Mr. Digby, his friend and correspondent, and the brother of Lady Scudamore, (to whom that mansion then belonged, and where he wrote his "Man of Ross,") he amused his leisure, by copying from Vandyck, in crayons, a head of Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. The Editor has seen it there, and it has considerable merit. Mr. W. has admitted several amateurs into his catalogue, upon as slight pretensions. Pope had no true taste for the sister art, and it is said, that he actually asked Dr. Arbuthnot whether Handel really deserved the fame, which he enjoyed?]

* See his letters to Jervas, and a short copy of verses on a fan designed by himself on the story of Cephalus and Procris. [Purchased at Mrs. Blount's sale, by Sir J. Reynolds.] There is a small edition of the Essay on Man, with a frontispiece likewise of his design.

† See Pope's epistle to Jervas with Dryden's translation of Fresnoy's Art of Painting.

Elizabeth Countess of Bridgwater, one of the beautiful daughters of the great Duke of Marlborough.

["An angel's sweetness or Bridgewater's eyes." Pope.]

imagination, that many a homely dame was delighted to find her picture resemble Lady Bridgwater.* Yet neither his presumption nor his passion could extinguish his self-love. One day, as she was sitting to him, he ran over the beauties of her face with rapture" but, said he, I cannot help telling your ladyship that you have not a handsome ear." "No! said Lady Bridgwater; pray, Mr. Jervas, what is a handsome ear?" He turned his cap, and showed her his own.

What little more I have to say of him, is chiefly scattered amongst the notes of Vertue. He was born in Ireland, and for a year studied under Sir Godfrey Kneller. Norris, frame-maker and keeper of the pictures to King William and Queen Anne, was his first patron, and permitted him to copy what he pleased in the royal collection. At Hampton-court he copied the cartoons in little, and sold them to Dr. George Clarke of Oxford, who became his protector, and furnished him with money to visit Paris and Italy. At the former he lent two of his cartoons to Audran, who engraved them, but died before he could begin the rest. At Rome he applied himself to learn to draw, for though thirty years old, he said he had begun at the wrong end, and had only studied colouring.

* [Pope, in the epistle, which shews how much the fame of the painter was indebted to the friendship of the poet, confers an extravagant praise, on this portrait in particular,

"With Zeuxis' Helen, thy Bridgewater vie."]

The friendship of Pope, and the patronage of other men of genius and rank,* extended a reputation built on such slight foundations: to which not a little contributed, we may suppose, the Tatler, No. VIII. April 18, 1709, who calls him the last great painter that Italy has sent us. Το this incense a widow worth 20,000l. added the solid, and made him her husband. In 1738 he again travelled to Italy for his health, but survived that journey only a short time, dying Nov. 2d, 1739.†

He translated and published a new edition of Don Quixote. His collection of drawings and Roman fayence, called Raphael's earthenware, and a fine cabinet of ivory carvings by Fiamingo, were sold, the drawings in April 1741, and the rest after the death of his wife.

* Seven letters from Jervas to Pope are printed in the two additional volumes to that poet's works, published by R. Baldwin, 1776. [These letters are reprinted in the Editions of Pope's works, by Dr. J. Warton, and W. Lisle Bowles, 8vo. 1797, and 1807. They show, on either side, the greatest attachment and friendship. Ruffhead's Life of Pope, p. 147.]

+ ["Pope remarked that he was acquainted with three painters, all men of ingenuity, but who wanted common sense. One fancied himself a military architect without mathematics, another was a fatalist without philosophy; and the third translated Don Quixote, without understanding Spanish." Warburton. The two last mentioned were evidently Kneller and Jervas.]

There is a large and fine collection of this ware at the late Sir Andrew Fountain's at Narford in Norfolk.

It will easily be conceived by those who know any thing of the state of painting in this country of late years, that this work pretends to no more than specifying the professors of most vogue. Portrait-painting has increased to so exuberant a degree in this age, that it would be difficult even to compute the number of limners that have appeared within the century. Consequently it is almost as necessary that the representations of men should perish and quit the scene to their successors, as it is that the human race should give place to rising generations. And indeed the mortality is almost as rapid. Portraits that cost twenty, thirty, sixty guineas, and that proudly take possession of the drawing-room, give way in the next generation to those of the new-married couple, descending into the parlour, where they are slightly mentioned as my father's and mother's pictures. When they become my grandfather and grandmother, they mount to the two pair of stairs; and then, unless dispatched to the mansion-house in the country,* or crouded into the housekeeper's room, they perish among the lumber

* [Few, who now survey Jervas's prim portraits of women, with their faint carnations, and wrapped up in yards of sattin, but will join in this censure.

When it had been remarked to Sir Joshua Reynolds, that pictures by Jervas, although so much celebrated in his time, were very rarely seen, he answered, briskly, "because they are all up in the garret." Northcote.]

of garrets, or flutter into rags before a broker's shop at the Seven Dials. Such already has been the fate of some of those deathless beauties, who Pope promised his friend should*

Bloom in his colours for a thousand years:

And such, I doubt, will be the precipitate catastrophe of the works of many more who babble of Titian and Vandyck, yet only imitate Giordano, whose hasty and rapacious pencil deservedly acquired him the disgraceful title of Luca fa presto.

* [Pope's injudicious and undeserved praise has been a subject of the caustic criticism of Barry. See Works, 4to. v. ii. pp. 399, 400, 401.]