BOOKS.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CHARLES ROBERT LESLIE, R.A.'

" IT is owing to the innate modesty of the late Mr. Leslie's cha- racter," says his judicious editor, that in his Autobiographical

Recollections the part occupied by himself and his picture is small in comparison with that devoted to his contemporaries and friends." It was solely that lie might speak of the latter that he resolved to write at all, and to pen some account of his own life as a vehicle for his interesting reminiscences. His profession made him acquainted with many persons whose names will, out- live the present age ; and he tells us what he knew of them that was best worth knowing—" not the faults and foibles that are more or less common to all men, but the merits that are rare, and on which alone their claims to distinction rest." He writes, in fact, as he painted, with the nicest perception of character, and a power of expressing it by the simplest means, and his likenesses are pleasing, not because they are flattered, but because they are true to the distinctive characteristics of their originals. What Leslie left undone with respect to himself and his pictures has been supplied in a very satisfactory manner by Mr. Tom Taylor in an introductory essay, and in chronological and other notices inserted in the second volume, which contains Leslie's correspon- dence. The book is fall of choice matter, and only wants an index to be as complete as able and careful editing could make it. Charles Robert Leslie was born in London on the 19th of Octo- ber, 1794, of American parents, his father's ancestors having been

Scotch, and his mother's English, and both having settled in Maryland in the last century as farmers. His father was a man of extraordinary ingenuity in mechanics, and having prospered as watchmaker in Philadelphia, he placed his business there in the hands of a partner, and came to London with his family about the year 1793 to purchase the clocks and watches wanted for the es- tablishment. It was an unfortunate arrangement, for the partner died, leaving the affairs of the house in confusion, and the family returned to America when Charles was five years old. They sailed from Gravesend on the 18th of September, 1799, and did not arrive at Philadelphia until the 1 1 th of the following May. They had been obliged to put into Lisbon for repairs, having fought and beaten a French privateer of thirty guns. Miss Leslie, who was some years older than her brother, and subsequently wrote an amusing account of their " Winter in Lisbon," says, that the house in which they resided had on each story ewe complete suites of rooms, each comprising a very large sitting room, four chambers, and a kitchen, of which the last only had a fireplace. The violent rain, which fell almost incessantly for weeks, poured in through the ill-made windows, and the dampness that pervaded the house, and all other houses in that fireless country, was with- out remedy ; shoes, books, clothes, and furniture were covered with blue mould, often in a single night ; and the cold was sometimes so severe that the family went regularly to bed after breakfast, and remained there all day, except at meal times. Such were the domestic comforts of a city i to which English physi- cians were then in the habit of sending invalids for the improve- ment of their health. Miss Leslie confesses that she and her brothers and sisters amused themselves with peeping through the keyhole, with a desire to be enlightened as to the manners and customs of the Portuguese people who occupied the adjoining suite of apartments. " We would not," she says, " have acted so dishonourably to persons of our own country, or even to British neighbours, but we regarded the Portuguese as ' no rule.' "

We soon ascertained that their general habiliments were old and slovenly, but that whenever a flue day tempted the lady-wife to walk out, she covered her dirty dark calico dress with an elegant blue satin cloak trimmed with ermine ; and had a barber to come and dress her hair, and

decorate it with embroidered ribbons; bonnets not yet being ' introduced into Portugal. Keeping no regular servant, she, for these occasions, hired, by the hour, two maids to walk after her. When any of her female friends came to visit our neighbour, they also brought their maids with them ; and while the mistresses were conversing on the sofa, the maids sat flat on the floor in front of them, and kept up a whispering talk with each other. Among other items of keyhole knowledge, we discovered that every day, about dinner-time, our neighbours had a table set out in their parlour with clean damask cloth and napkins, pieces of bread, silver forks, spoons, castors, &c.; handsome wine-glasses, and goblets, and all the paraphernalia of a very genteel dinner equipage. The table stood thus during an hour or more ; so that if visitors came in, they might suppose that the family were preparing to sit down in style comme it faut. But to this table they never did sit down ; for when the time of exhibition had elapsed, all the fine things were taken off and carefully put away for a similar show the next day, and the next. Meanwhile (as we found by reconnoitring through the kitchen keyhole) the Portuguese family all assembled in the place where their food was cooked; seated themselves on the floor round a large earthen pan filled with some sort of stew; and each dipped in a pewter spoon and fed out of that same pan." The last years of Leslie's excellent father were full of trouble and suffering, and he died in 1804, leaving his widow with scarcely any means to support her children. The two boys were sent to school at the University of Pennsylvania, where the charge for their tuition was abated by the kindness of the professors ; and in 1808, Charles was apprenticed to Messrs. Bradford and Ins- keep, the most enterprising booksellers in Philadelphia. Charles, who had been fond of drawing from his infancy, would rather have been a painter, but his ',mother had no means of giving him a professional.educatien. His kind but strict master set his face against the use of the pencil, and seemed to be the last man who • Autobiographical Recollections by the late Chat les Robert Leslie, . Edited, with a Prefatory Essay on Leslie as an Artist, and Selections from his Correspon- dence. By Toni Taylor, Esq. In two volumes. With Portrait. Published by Murray.

would help his apprentice to become a painter, and yet he did it. The circumstance which changed his views and fixed young Leslie's destiny, grew out of the enthusiasm caused by the arrival in America of the celebrated actor, George Frederick Cooke. The boy, who shared fully in the public excitement, was raised to sudden fame among Op wealthiest men in the city by a likeness he drew of the great actor, and Mr. Bradford found no difficulty in collecting a fund by subscription, to which he contributed libe- rally himself, sufficient to enable the young artist to study paint- ing for two years in Europe. Furnished with letters to some eminent artists, Charles sailed for England under the care of Mr. Inskeep, and arrived at Liverpool on the 3d of December, 1811, and started thence for the paradise of art he had dreamed of for years.

" Notwithstanding the gloomy season of the year, I entered London with such feelings as we can experience, perhaps, but once in our lives. It was my birthplace, and my earliest recollections belonged to it. I had a kind of dreamy. remembrance of the magnificence of St. Paul's, and the splendour of the Lord Mayor's show. The novels of Miss Burney, and the " Picture of London," had made me acquainted with its chief objects of interest, and I had often amused myself with tracing its localities on the maps. Familiar with the engraved works of Hogarth, the very purlieus of St. Giles's, from whence his backgrounds are so frequently taken, possessed to my imagina- tion the charm of classic ground. For the last three years I had enjoyed opportunities of seeing all the most interesting books as they arrived from England in the bloom of novelty. The talk of the literary men who fre- quented Mr. Bradford's shop, was often of London and its wonders. I knew the names and styles of the principal English artists from the many engravings I had opportunities of seeing. Passionately fond of the theatre, I knew that Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Jordan, Bannister, Dowton, and Munden were still on the stage ; and I had heard of Liston, Mathews, and Emery, who were then in the meridian of their glory. I had seen one of the finest of West's pictures, (his Lear in the Storm,") and I was to see and know the great artist himself. All this to a boy of sixteen, and of such tastes as I have described, could not but afford anticipations of the most intoxicating delight. Nor did the reality fall short of the anticipation."

Leslie's first instructors in painting were West, and Allston, another American. The latter made him acquainted with his friend Coleridge, whose lectures on Shakspeare and Milton " gave him a much more distinct and satisfactory view of the nature and ends of poetry, and of painting, than he ever had before." He had hoped for much advantage from the instructions of Fuseli, the keeper of the Antique Academy ; but believes he profited better under his " wise neglect." " For those students who are born with powers that will make them eminent, it is sufficient to place fine works of art before them. They do not want instruction, and they that do are not worth it. Art may be learned, but can't be taught." Leslie himself tells us that his taste was very faulty at first, and long in forming. There was a time when he thought West equal to Raffaelle, and when he took it for a joke of Allston's that he pointed out to him " The Ages " by Titian, as an exquisite work ; and he honestly confesses that until he became intimate with Constable, he really knew nothing, or worse than nothing, of landscape, " for I admired, as poetical, styles which I now see to be mannered, conventional, and extravagant." Eight years excepted, Leslie was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy from 1813 to 1859, the year of his death. The "Death of Rut- land," the subject of which was taken from Shakspeare's Henry VI., was his first venture in the work in which he excelled all other painters—the illustration of our English classics ; but the picture which established his reputation in this line, was his "Sir Roger de Coverley Going to Church." It was exhibited in 1819, and that year may he considered as Leslie's startino.° point on the road to fame and fortune. In 1821, he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and was made R.A. in 1826. " I hope," says his affectionate friend Washington Irving, congratulating him on that event, " I hope you will rise to the dignity of hang- man, and will do your duty by Newton and the rest of your old gang." The appointment to the office of Teacher of Drawing in the Military Academy of West Point induced him to emigrate to America in 1833, but he retained it only seven months, and was glad to return to the society of his brother artists in England in the spring of the following year. His election to the Professor- ship of Painting in the Academy, in 1848, is the last salient point to be noticed in an uneventful but well-filled life, " spent in the affectionate discharge of family duties—which no man ever ful- filled better—and in the happy practice of his art." And, says the congenial editor of Recollections and Correspondence :- " I sincerely believe, that when the pictorial art of our time comes to be classed with that which preceded and that which will follow it, Leslie's name will stand honoured, for the prevailing presence in his works of good taste, truth, character, humour, grace, and kindliness, and for the entire absence of that vulgarity, bravado, self-seeking, trick, and excess, which are by no means inseparable from great attainments in painting, and which the conditions of modern art are but too apt to engender and foster. . . . How could he be other than truthful, lovely, charitable, and tasteful in his pictures, who, in his home, as in society, in his teaching as in his conduct, was habitually sincere, affectionate, equable, thoughtful of others, tolerant, loving to dwell rather on the good than on the bad about him ? It would be well if there were more lives that should show so exact a parallel of good at- tributed in the workman and his works."

Leslie's Recollections abound in the raciest anecdotes, presented with exquisite perfection of touch ; we can only make room for a few specimens from the rich collection. Here are two of Cole- ridge.

"I once found Coleridge driving the balls on a bagatelle-board for a kitten to run after them. He noticed that, as soon as the little thing turned its back to the balls it seemed to forget all about them, and played with its tail. I am amused,' he said, with their little short metuories.'" "A few days after the appearance of his piece [the tragedy of _Remorse], he was sitting in the coffee-room of a hotel, and heard his name coupled with a coroner's inquest, by a gentleman who was reading a newspaper to a friend. He asked to see the paper, which was handed to him with the remark that It was very extraordinary that Coleridge, the poet, should have hanged himself just after the success of his play; but he was always a strange mad fellow.' `Indeed, sir,' said Coleridge, it is a most extraor- dinary thing that he should have banged himself, be the subject of an in- quest, and yet that he should at this moment be speaking to you.' The astonished stranger hoped he had said nothing to hurt his feelings,' and was made easy on that point. The newspaper related that a gentleman in black had been cut down from a tree in Hyde Park, without money or pa- pers in his pockets, his shirt-being marked S. T. Coleridge' ; and Cole- ridge was at no loss to understand how this might have happened, since he seldom travelled without losing a shirt or two."

The following is given merely as an illustration of Charles Lamb's playfulness. The anecdote has been differently told, but Leslie's version of it is authentic :-

" I dined with him one day at Mr. Gillman's. Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gillman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A. woman asked the coachman, are you full inside?' Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, ' I am quite full inside ; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gillman's did the business for me.' "

Leslie met Colonel Garwood at dinner at Chantrey's.

" He could talk of nothing but the Duke of Wellington. Speaking of the publication of his Despatches, he said, I have unveiled a great man to the world. He is the greatest creature God Almighty ever created. But he don't write so well now as he did, for he thinks everything he writes will be printed, and he takes pains.' "

Chantrey was, in Leslie's opinion, " the Reynolds of portrait sculpture." In his bust of Sir Walter Scott, the most perfect, in Leslie's opinion, of the many portraits of the original, " the gentle turn of the head, and the lurking humour in the eye and about the mouth, were Scott's own ; " but " there was more bene- volence expressed in Scott's face than is given in any portrait of him ; and I am sure there was much in his heart." 'Doubtless, this characteristic was preserved in the portrait which Leslie painted at Abbotsford, in 1824, for Mr. Ticknor, of Boston, but we are not aware that it has ever been engraved. Among the anecdotes about Sir Walter which Leslie gathered on this occasion were these :—the Tom Purdey who figures in the first of them was Sir Walter's favourite gamekeeper.

"Mr. Cadell told me that, as Sir Walter was leaning on Purdey's arm, in one of his walks, Tom said, Them are fine novels of yours, Sir Walter ;

they are just invaluable to me.' I am glad to hear it, Tom.' Yes, sir, for when I have been out all day, hard at work, and come home, vary tired, if it sit down with a pot of porter by the fire, and take up one of your novels, I'm asleep directly.'

"Cadell told me that, in allusion to the opinion that Lord Byron's lame- ness was the occasion of his misanthropy, he said to Scott, Your temper has not suffered from the same misfortune,' and Scott replied, When I was of the age at which lads like to shine in the eyes of the girls, I have felt some envy, in a ball-room, of the young fellows who had the use of their legs; but I generally, found when I was beside the lasses / had the advantage with my tongue.' "

Lord Melbourne was the finest specimen of manly beauty in the meridian of life. "His laugh was frequent, an the mosC,,joymis possible, and his voice so deep and musical, that to hear Nosey ' — the most ordinary things was a pleasure.

"I met Lord Melbourne at Lady Holland's a day or two after he ceased to be Prime Minister. He was as joyous as ever, and only took part in the conversation respecting the changes in the Royal household (which were not then completed) to make everybody laugh.—' I hear,' said a lady, that —,' naming a duke of not the most correct habits, is quite scurrilous ab not getting an appointment.'—' No,' said Lord Holland, he can't be scur- rilous.'—' Well, then, he is very angry.'—' It serves him right,' said Lord Melbourne, ' for being a Tory. None of these immoral men ought to be Tories. If he had come to me I would not have refused him.

" He asked me how it was that Raphael was employed by the Pope to paint the walls of the Vatican.—I said, Because of his great excellence.'— But was not his uncle, Bramante, architect to the Pope ? '—I replied, c I believe Bramante was his uncle.'—' Then it was a job, you may be sure,' he said, with his hearty laugh."

Of the late Sir Robert Peel Leslie says :— " It is much to be regretted that there is no portrait that does him justice for he had a fine head. Lawrence's half-length is the best ; but in that the, dress challenges equal attention with the face. The late statues, busts, and pictures of him are miserable things ; indeed, his face, like his conduct, has been subject to more misrepresentation than has been the case with moat public men. Lawrence by the emphasis which he laid on the tie of his cra- vat, the velvet waistcoat, and the glittering watch-guard, made a dandy of him. Now, though there were some peculiarities in his manner of dressing, Sir Robert Peel was so far from dandyism, that George the Fourth (no in- competent judge) remarked that his clothes never fitted him. The truth I believe to be, that the King, though glad to avail himself of Peel's great talents, looked on him as a plebeian, and therefore deficient in that taste, in small as well as in great things, which is supposed by some to be the birth- right only of Royal or noble blood. Sidney Smith related a pleasant invention illustrative of this,—which represented eel, when in the Ministry, and on a visit at the Brighton Pavilion, as called out of bed in the middle of the night to attend his Majesty in what—his dinner having disagreed with him in a very alarming manner—the King supposed to be his last momenta. Peel was much affected, and the King, after a few words, which he could scarcely utter, said, Go, my dear Peel,—God bless you! I shall never see you again ; " and, as Peel turned to leave the room, he added faintly, Who made that dressing-gown, my dear Peel ? It sits very badly behind. God bless you, my dear fellow ! Never employ that tailor again.' "

The best result for Leslie of his visit to America in 1833 was the intimacy it led to with Captain Morgan. He had a good story apropos of everything that happened, for instance :—

Single ladies often cross the water under the especial care of the cap- tain of the ship ; and if a love affair occurs among the passengers, the cap- tain is usually the confidante of one or both parties. A very fascinating young lady was placed under Morgan's care, and three young gentlemen fell desperately in love with her. They were all equally agreeable, and the young lady was puzzled which to encourage. She asked the captain'', advice. Come on deck,' he said, ' the first day when it is perfectly calm— the gentlemen will of course, all be near you. I will have a boat quietly lowered down ; then do you jump overboard and see which of the gentlemen will be the first to jump after you. I will take care of you.' A calm day

soon came, the captain's suggestion was followed, and two of the lovers jumped after the lady at the same instant. But between these two the lady could not decide, so exactly equal had been their devotion. She again consulted the captain. 'Take the man that didn't jump—he's the most sensible fellow, and will make the best husband.' "

We close with one out of a long string of anecdotes of the late Sam Rogers. It relates to his intimate friend, Mr. Maltby, the Librarian of the London Institution.

"Maltby was one of the moat absent of men. While in Paris together Rogers dined at a party, where a lady who eat next him did not know him at first, but after hearing him talk for some time discovered who he was. Maltby was not at this dinner, and Rogers telling him of this lady said, she asked if my name was not Rogers.' And was it ? ' inquired Maltby."