in color, or stiff in composition; sometimes full of imagination, at others
literal and prosaic,--but always impressive reproductions of interesting or
peculiar scenery. In later years he used in conversation to qualify himself
as a "topographical artist;" and the definition was true, though not
exhaustive. He had an intuitive and a perfectly trained eye for the
character and beauty of distant mountain lines, the solemnity of rocky
gorges, the majesty of a single mountain rising from a base of plain or
sea; and he was equally exact in rendering the true forms of the middle
distances and the specialties of foreground detail belonging to the various
lands through which he had wandered as a sketcher. Some of his pictures
show a mastery which has rarely been equalled over the difficulties of
painting an immense plain as seen from a height, reaching straight away
from the eye of the spectator until it is lost in a dim horizon. Sir
Roderick Murchison used to say that he always understood the geological
peculiarities of a country he had only studied in Lear's sketches. The
compliment was thoroughly justified; and it is not every landscape-painter
to whom it could honestly be paid.

The history of Lear's choice of a career was a curious one. He was the
youngest of twenty-one children, and, through a family mischance, was
thrown entirely on the limited resources of an elderly sister at a very
early age. As a boy he had always dabbled in colors for his own amusement,
and had been given to poring over the ordinary boys' books upon natural
history. It occurred to him to try to turn his infant talents to account;
and he painted upon cardboard a couple of birds in the style which the
older among us remember as having been called Oriental tinting, took them
to a small shop, and sold them for fourpence. The kindness of friends, to
whom he was ever grateful, gave him the opportunity of more serious and
more remunerative study, and he became a patient and accurate zoölogical
draughtsman. Many of the birds in the earlier volumes of Gould's