descend, like the angels on Jacob's ladder, whose foot was upon the
earth, but its top reached to Heaven.

'And this great man had his unlucky circumstance. He became mad after
the philosopher's stone, and did but very little in painting or drawing
afterwards. Judge what that was, and whether there was not an
alteration of style from what he had done before this devil possessed
him. His creditors endeavoured to exorcise him, and did him some good,
for be set himself to work again in his own way; but if a drawing I have
of a Lucretia be that he made for his last picture, as it probably is
(Vasari says that was the subject of it), it is an evident proof of his
decay; it is good indeed, but it wants much of the delicacy which is
commonly seen in his works; and so I always thought before I knew or
imagined it to be done in this his ebb of genius.'

We have had two artists of our own country whose fate has been as
singular as it was hard: Gandy was a portrait-painter in the beginning
of the last century, whose heads were said to have come near to
Rembrandt's, and he was the undoubted prototype of Sir Joshua Reynolds's
style. Yet his name has scarcely been heard of; and his reputation,
like his works, never extended beyond his own country. What did he
think of himself and of a fame so bounded? Did he ever dream he was
indeed an artist? Or how did this feeling in him differ from the vulgar
conceit of the lowest pretender? The best known of his works is a
portrait of an alderman of Exeter, in some public building in that city.

Poor Dan. Stringer! Forty years ago he had the finest hand and the
clearest eye of any artist of his time, and produced heads and drawings
that would not have disgraced a brighter period in the art. But he fell
a martyr (like Burns) to the society of country gentlemen, and then of