Copley's Life and Paintings. By Augustus T. Perkins. (Sampson Low
and Co.)—Relatives are not usually the beat biographers. They bask in the brilliant rays of their distinguished kinsman, and if they can add to that brilliance, they benefit by the greater brightness, while they re- sent as a personal injury anything which seems to lessen his glory. Mr. Perkins, who, we believe, married a great-granddaugher of the painter, is troubled in this way. Some writers have published certain errors regarding the youth and education of Copley, and one so far forgot himself as to imagine Boston in 1769 "a mere trading-post." The author hereupon gives us an elaborate genealogy of both father and mother, and the present representatives of the family in the English aristocracy, and to vindicate the honour of outraged Boston he produces a list of eight judges and lawyers, twenty distinguished women, ton statesmen and politioians, and eleven great merchants, who were living there at the time. The memoir is dull, with the exception of one characteristic anecdote, which is deemed good enough for repetition in the notices of the pictures. The paintings in America, with few ex- ceptions, are portraits, and to relieve the monotony of description of "hair not powdered," "right hand finely painted," or "gracefully extended," we have frequently the genealogy or family history of the subjects given to us. This part of the work might perhaps be best described as "Burke on the Pictured Gentry."
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