hours of life are drawing to a close, to take a calm and deliberate view of his few and faulty days. With penitence and grief he deplores his many failings and his shortcomings; but with humble hope and faith he directs the eye of his mind to an approaching hereafter. He surveys society; notes down the changes which have taken place during his lengthened career; perceives how those things which he took to be evils were vast and real benefits; and admires that providential course which has led not only him but others through difficulties and dangers which appeared to be overwhelming. He has time allowed to him to review the history of his nation, the march of the world, the progress of truth, the defeat of error, the changes brought

about by apparently insignificant causes,

and the littleness of events which himself and his contemporaries had magnified into matters of vast behest. He completes the records of his life; arranges the data for his future biographer; seeks not to magnify his own doings, but to point out the wise and beneficent ordinations of Providence; and after commending his country and his family, man at large, and his friends and enemies to the mercy of Heaven, sinks quietly to rest beneath the horizon of this world, only to rise with glory and splendor in another and better hemisphere.

A DEFENCE OF LONDON:

ON HEARING SURPRISE EXPRESSED THAT POETS SHOULD LIVE
THERE.

BY CAMILIA TOULMIN.

Nor live in LONDON! Wherefore not? come tell.

Think ye that Poesy alone can dwell

Within a rustic cot, where zephyr brings,
Upon its treasure-laden, perfumed wings,
Tribute from every flower; or where the sky
Seems, in its ether's clear intensity,
A loftier arch than spans our populous town,
Whose age is poetry ? - A well so vast
That ever self-supplying, it has grown

Exhaustless in its wealth. Present and Past

(And a bright Future, that to poets' eyes
Doth as poet's glorious vision rise,)
Alike impregnate LONDON's "cloud-capp'd tow-

ers"

With Poesy's own soul. Swiftly the hours
Bring death to us, but this immortal is

Even on earth:-let mighty man o'erthrow
Each monumental fane, it is not his

To find oblivion's fount, nor does he know
The secret to destroy; even as now,
Each broken stone a ready tongue would find,
Wherewith to wisely charm all those who will
With open ears to listen. Oh! not blind

To nature's loveliness are they who still
May love the regal city; and perchance,
Contrast may so a rural scene enhance,

That they most feel it, and best mark the links
Which bind in one bright, universal chain,

All Poesy:-from the parched blade that drinks

The welcome dew, through the vast myriad train
Of things and thoughts, till at the best he feels
Most rich the lore the city's haunt reveals.
"Man made it!" True: but caught by tripping
speech,

Ye do forget the Greater Architect
Who formed his workman, man.

I do beseech.

The last time I saw De Chateaubriand he was praying. In a very quiet church, at a very quiet altar, in a very quiet corner, as far removed from the world and its cares, its noise and its dissipation, as if situate in some secluded dell or on some snow-clad mountain, Chateaubriand was pouring forth his soul to God in a house of prayer. I had seen him at the grave of Miss Frisell, I had read in manuscript his "Jeune fille et jeune fleur," but now I beheld him on the fète-day Of such good fellowship? Ay, even they, of "Henri Cinq," imploring for his absent The IMPERIAL TWO, who jointly sway prince the best blessings of Heaven. There

he was in a posture of humble adoration and meek submission, before the altar of his God, and his fine face seemed lighted up by his devotion and his love. This is not poetry or fiction, but unvarnished truth. His mind and heart have been long sweetly attuned by adversity and disappointment, and whilst he is by no means a splenetic or discontented man, he has learned to set a right value on all that is beneath the sun; and is preparing his mind and heart for that paradise where there shall be no more sin!

Ye, marvel not that Poets should select
Old London for a home;-true bards will own
The inspiration of the busy town.
Have not the greatest dwelt within her walls-
Mix'd with their fellow men-obey'd
'd the calls

The realms of Mind! (as in the Roman world,
Two eagle banners were at once unfurl'd.)
The PEERLESS BARD, whose wise and deathless

strain

Was wealth the richest of the Maiden's reign-
Who in the town not only learn'd to read

SIR FRANCIS CHANTREY AND ALLAN

CUNNINGHAM.

From Fraser's Magazine.

seers, though to the infinite annoyance of many who were pushed by their more burly companions beneath the drip of the dead We recollect a sawyer in Pimlico (one of Chantrey's sawyers) who had a

man.

BEFORE the days of Sir Francis Chantrey, new hat spoiled, he told us, by Jerry's Mr. Cubitt, Mr. Nash, and King George grease. He had gone to see this sight for IV., Pimlico was a quiet, unpretending Sunday visitors, and was pushed underplace, made up of the Five Fields, a Wil- neath poor Jerry in chains. "The hat," low Walk, the Crown and Anchor, and the he said, "was not only spoiled, but I never Bag of Nails (i. e. as some say, The Baccha- wore it again. There was no getting the nals!) with Townshend, the Bow-Street drip out, and I was afraid to wear it. It officer, and Jerry Abershaw, for its chief cost me fourteen and sixpence on the Sat

inhabitants. Prior to this time, for we al lude to the days of good Queen Elizabeth, lived one Pimlico (we know not his Chris tian name) famous for brewing and selling a particular kind of ale, in the marshy land lying between St. James's Fields, the Millbank, and the retired village of Chelsea. We read in Ben Jonson of Pimlico Path as a promenade for a summer evening, and we make little doubt but the road referred to led to the house of mine host, from whom the path received its name, where the citizens and their wives, and the "men of sort so we conceive it is only a step to turn and quality" west of Temple Bar, resorted from Townshend and Jerry Abershaw to

urday night; and so I was served for seeing Jerry. Jerry's house still stands in the Willow Walk, amid the fine palaces which Mr. Cubitt has built there. It has still a thievish aspect, and seems as if it could speak of many midnight doings.

to enjoy that pleasant mixture which our ancestors so much indulged in-custards and ale. The custards are out of fashion (more's the pity), but "Pimlico ale" is still an attractive signboard and drink in the suburbs of London. See how notoriety is sometimes achieved. Mine host gives his name to a cask of ale, the district he brews and sells in is known by the name of the brewer. Mr. Pimlico, like a great distiller of our times, has a Boothia Felix of his own; and now the royal sign manual warrants of

But we must fly from the Five Fields, "where the robbers lie in wait," as the Tattler tells us, and as there is an old Scotch song, which says:

"To gae to Lon'on's but a walk;"

Sir Francis Chantrey and Allan Cunningham, two men better known in Pimlico than the Queen, when unattended. Those who did not know their works, knew, at least, their persons; and the small shortmake, round little face, long drab coat, and bald head of the one, with the tall manly make, the dark bright eyes, and the long gray coat of the other, marked them out to many as persons to turn round and look at; the more so, as it was the custom of both to walk bareheaded from the studio,

1843 are no longer dated from the Bucking- in Ecclestone Street, to the foundry in the

ham house of old Queen Charlotte, but from our palace at Pimlico. The name of a humble tapster in the days of Queen Bess has been given to the palace of Queen Victoria. Why may not imagination," says Hamlet, "trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?" Why not, since we find the reverse, for here truth traces the name of a tapster employed to distinguish the palace of great people more mighty than Macedon, with all her Indian acquisitions and honors.

Poor Townshend, with all his delightful reminiscences of Jonathan Wild, of Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and Hounslow, with his Lord Burleigh-like shake of the head and significant toss of cane, he has gone to the vaults of St. Peter's, Pimlico. Poor Jerry Abershaw had another fate, for Jerry hung in chains, and dripped on hot Sundays, much to the amusement of Cockney sightVOL. II. No. III. 31

Mews, a considerable distance, and lying across a public thoroughfare. Both these great men have died within a year of one another, and, royalists as we are, in the best sense of the word, we are sure we utter nothing offensive or disloyal, when we say that the two leading lights of Pimlico are gone, and that Art has left the region she loved so much to delight in.

It was in the year 1810 that Chantrey came first to Pimlico. He began in a very small way, with very little to do and very little to do it on. Now it so happens that a man may shine truly a poet (nature always consenting) with one pen, a sheet or two of paper, and a pennyworth of ink. That a painter may buy at a very cheap rate both colors and canvass, but a young sculptor cannot often afford to work in marble, and works, therefore, to a very great disadvantage. A true poet, without the printer's aid, is a poet to few or none; the more fertile his mind in inventing and

and a sculptor who cannot afford to cut his conceptions in marble is, like a painter, confined to chalk and outlines. It was so with Chantrey before his name was known. His bust of Horn Tooke (one of his very early works) he was too poor to have cut in marble. It was sent to the Royal Academy Exhibition in plaster, and though Nollekens gave it one of his emphatic words of approbation, it was comparatively lost to the world, for the multitude of visitors adopt as their rule in going the round of the sculpture-room to look only at such works as are in marble. When in plaster, they seem to the ignorant many to lack the seal of approbation, which the transfer from plaster to marble would seem to imply. It is not enough to suffer from the opaque material they are in, but they must lie under the double disadvantage of a vulgar prejudice.

We shall not stay to inquire whether marriage made Flaxman an artist, or unmade him, as Reynolds thought and told him; it is enough for us that marriage made Chantrey, for he got money with

supplying wants. Wilkie's converting a chest of drawers into an easel, by pulling out one of the drawers and resting the head of his canvass against the cornice, is, when compared with the youthful inventions of others, a silly expedient. The person or parties who told the story of Chantrey's butter-modelling would prefer the juvenile labor, if it ever existed, to a better posi tion in the rooms than they would give to the clay of John Rennie or the marble of Sir Walter Scott. We know that Allan Cunningham said the story was a mere pastry-cook's invention, not only untrue, but unlikely.

It has been affirmed, both in conversation and in print, that our young sculptor had other obstacles to overcome than the want of clay or marble; he had, as an apprentice to a carver in wood, to conquer the dislike of his master to his working, even in his leisure hours, in any other line than the mystery he was bound to learn and his master to teach him. This master's name was Ramsay, and he lived in Sheffield. He has been long dead, but has a son still alive,

his wife, could afford to wait for patrons, who denies, we understand, that his father and had the means of purchasing marble. discountenanced in any way the juvenile The first use he made of his wife's money efforts of young Chantrey. Some disagreewas to transfer the head of Horne Tooke ment, however, we have been well assured, to marble. What was inimitable in clay took place, and that Chantrey purchased was matchless in its new semi-transparent up the remainder of his time from Ramsay material. All the cunning and sagacity of before he had been well three years in his the man are there. The eyes, colorless service. The poet Rogers has a table

though they are, look as if scanning you from head to foot. There is no escape from the penetrating survey he is making of you. It was quite a new head in marble, and, if the reason is ever asked of the Royal Academy why they permit the exhibition of the same work twice, in plaster and in marble, this bust of Horne Tooke, if the plaster still exists, is more than sufficient to warrant them in adhering to so excellent a rule.

actually carved by Sir Francis. Our great sculptor recognized the table when his fame was established, and pleased the poet with the recognition.

Chantrey was designed by his father for the law; accident made him a carver in wood, poverty a painter, and his own genius a sculptor. The sight of some figures in the shop window of Ramsay attracted his attention on the very day he was to commence his study of the law. He stopIt is told of Chantrey that he had, when ped to examine them, and became irrecora boy, a greater difficulty to conquer in be- erably a sculptor. Cowley was made a coming an artist than the want of marble. poet, and Reynolds a painter, much in the It is said he was without clay, and that his same way. Allan Cunningham had a por first work was made in the butter he was trait in oil of Chantrey from Chantrey's to sell at Sheffield for his father, a farmer own hand. It was clever and characteristic, near Norton, in Derbyshire. Now, for our a good deal in the manner of Opie-the reown part, we do not believe one word of sult of a morning's work, when disappointed this; nay, we have the very best authority in a sitter. He had been a second Sir Joshua for saying that it is not in part only, but but al- if he had not been Sir Francis Chantrey. together a lie. When a man dies there are His tact and talent had made him a good fifty, and more, ready to recollect instan- country attorney-a Morant, a Gillow, or a ces without number of precocious genius Snell, or any other respectable upholsterer, in the mighty dead; the greater the man, but his own genius made him the first and the greater the obstacles he overcame- | best sculptor of his age.

1

He lost his father when but a mere boy, other Academicians not a little by saying,

and his mother married again, much to the dissatisfaction of Francis, their only child. He still, however, continued to entertain a filial affection for her, and, though she lived to a great age, she died without the sincere forgiveness of her son, who in all his letters, and on all his letters, addressed her as Mrs. Chantrey, never recognizing her, even in conversation, by her own name. No one has said a word of the cruelties of his step-father, or of any thing injurious to his character. It was the act of his mother that he never overlooked-a step which occasioned, we may little doubt, the clause in his will in which he ties down Lady Chantrey to a wid

that Fuseli was the only decent scholar the Academy ever had, and that he, indeed, was only a scholar among painters: : "Parr said so,' ," he would add, "and so did Dr. Burney." Sir Martin Shee, in one of his lectures, or addresses, to the students of the Royal Academy, on the distribution of the prizes, raised a question very easily answered, whether Raphael or Reynolds had painted one whit better with a Winkleman, a Walpole, or a Cunningham, to advise him? At the mention of the name of Cunningham (and Allan was present), a murmur of approbation ran through the room; but Academical brows began to low

owhood for life. Chantrey always thought er, and Shee was taxed next day, in a counit as something sinful in the widow of Napo- cil summoned for the purpose, with breakleon to marry, and was heard to commend ing one great rule of the Royal Academy, with a shrug of approbation the reply made the rule which prohibits any allusion whatby the great Duchess of Marlborough, That ever to a living individual. Sir Martin she, the widow of John Churchill, would Shee, a poet, got with a good grace out of never consent to become the wife of this seeming difficulty. "I made no referanother. "May a Scotch ensign get her," ence," said Sir Martin, "to Allan Cunningsaid Vanbrugh, in an angry mood. When, ham; I referred, indeed, to a Cunningham, at a dinner party in Chantrey's own house, but my reference was to the Cunningham one of the company was heard to allude to who wrote upon Shakspeare." Chantrey the widow of Sir Philip Sydney becoming and the whole council were at once satisthe wife of the noble Devereux, Earl of fied with the imaginary commentator, and Essex, Chantrey, a most attentive listener, Shee, no doubt, chuckled at home over their did not seem to disapprove; but, when her ignorant credulity, as Chantrey did over third marriage was mentioned as a piece his friend Cunningham, much to Allan's of history (for he was no great reader), amusement, not his amazement. Allan his face blackened with horror at such for- knew too well the measure and value of getfulness of the dead. If our great sculp- the President's approval, and the extent of tor had read more, he had thought less of Academical ignorance. "He supports his

so common an occurrence in the pages of biographical history. But Chantrey was no great reader, and if he had been Rajah of Lahore, or king in Oude, he had burnt his widow on his own funeral pile. It is the fault, indeed, of all our English artists, that they paint too much, and read and reflect too little. Of all classes of men of genius they are the worst informed. The late Sir George Beaumont was always urging Wilkie to read more. "You can never have read too much," wrote Sir George; "Warburton, with all his reading, had read but a tithe of what was worth reading in his own days. Our stock of literature has since

want of acquired knowledge by keeping good company," says Evelyn of the great Duke of Marlborough. How true of Sir Francis Chantrey!

Chantrey's excellencies, obvious as they were to the most common observer, were not at first recognized beyond the discerning few or the then limited circle of his own private friends. The Royal Academy opened its eyes unwillingly to his merits, for between 1804, when he exhibited in Somerset House, and 1817, when his "Sleeping Children" moved the hearts and fired the tastes of all, there were thirteen years of struggle, in which his talents found

amazingly increased, and a mere spare a very slender meed of approbation. He hour, or half-an-hour reader can, even after was for many years an inveterate anti-Acaa Methuselah-like length of existence, have demy man, and it is but too true that his read but little." Of Chantrey's great rival, genius forced its own way into the Acadeor predecessor, in busts, Old Nollekens, it is my, and that before he had attained the entold, that the annual extent of his reading vied esquireship, and its further appendage was the annual Academy catalogue; of of R. A., he had ranked as one of the very President West, that he never read more first sculptors of his country, and one of than the passage he had to illustrate. Allan the most original of our island artists. His Cunningham used to vex Chantrey and rise into reputation and Academical honors was slow beyond example. The modest upon the mind of the artist employed, and, Wilkie found a friend in Sir George Beau- in fact, that the conception and sentiment mont before he had been a year in London, of the group were supplied to the artist in but Chantrey was an Academician before the melancholy fates of the two sisters. that true judge and universal patron of The lady's 's name was Mrs. Robinson.

genius had done more than acknowledge his bow as he met him in the street. Chantrey was a proud man, he has been heard to say, when Sir George Beaumont first set foot within his studio.

The two "Sleeping Children" made a stir in the dominions of arts: the group was something new in English Sculpture, so unlike the epigrammatic conceits of the great Roubiliac, or the classic conceptions of the still greater Flaxman-a work at

The commission given, Chantrey set off to his friend Stothard, and engaged that poetic artist to make two or three sketches of two young girls lying asleep in each other's arms. Stothard made the necessary sketches, and received some fifteen guineas for an evening's labor. From these sketches Chantrey then began his own sketch in clay. He borrowed a bit from one, a bit from another, and the air and position from a third; imbued them all with

once domestic and poetic, having its origin his own good taste, and composed, after a in our very homes, and making its way to fashion of his own, the lovely group that every heart. Thousands of eyes have lends so great an attraction to Lichfield moistened at the sight of this lovely and Cathedral. We have seen the several affecting group; thousands of tongues have sketches made by Stothard for this monudwelt upon its excellencies, and the pen of ment; we have seen, moreover, Chantrey's Mr. Bowles has poetized its tranquil pathos. first result, made from an attentive conYet we have been told, and are told now, sideration of Stothard's indications, and we that the merit of the work belongs to Sto- have, as it were, the monument at Lichfield

thard, and that Chantrey only turned to clay and marble a sketch which that graceful artist had drawn, with some care and much feeling, upon paper.

It is a common cry nowadays, that whatever is excellent is not original. That art can seize upon no new postures, or contrive no new sentiment, that the germ and substance of every thing new has its source and existence in something old. But this cry was found of no avail with the "Sleeping Children" of Sir Francis Chantrey; and the merit of a work which all conspired to praise, envy made over to another. We have something to reveal on this point, at once new and interesting.

before our eyes at this very moment. In Stothard's sketches (they still exist), the children lie very much as they lie in the finished marble, the attitudes of both are very similar; and any one who has seen the monument, and who was totally in the dark about the circumstances we are here relating, would say, we make little doubt, that these sketches were either Chantrey's first conceptions, or some young artist's hasty recollections of the finished marble. Perhaps we shall not go far wrong when we say that the commission gave the first idea of this monument, that Stothard supplied the leading sentiment and story, and that Chantrey, by elongating the figures, adding repose to the action, and all the graces of execution in which he was so great a master, completed the much-talkedof and much-admired monument at Lichfield to the two children. The snowdrops which the youngest had plucked, and which remain undropped from her hand, was a touch of poetic beauty, for which Chantrey was indebted to his friend and assistant Allan Cunningham. Chantrey, indeed, had many hints of a like nature from the same poetic quarter. Chantrey could adopt, if he could not conceive.

Two young and lovely girls, the one about eleven, and the other thirteen years of age, came both about the same time to unnatural ends. The younger, we believe, was accidentally burned to death, and the elder, soon after, when in the midst of health, ruptured a blood-vessel, and the two, who had lain together in the same bed when alive, were laid together, as it were, in one another's arms in the same grave. When time had lessened the severity of her grief, the widowed, and now childless mother, anxious to erect a monument over the grave of her children, visits the studio of ChanIt is not our intention in this paper to trey, and, pleased with what she saw around particularize the more general and wellher, commissions the monument from the known events of Chantrey's life, but to give young sculptor. We are thus particular, such sketches and recollectionsof our great because we wish to urge that the circum-sculptor as a long acquaintance can readily stances under which the monument was supply. No one knew him intimately but commissioned naturally forced themselves | Allan Cunningham, and he is gone, but not,