explained to you the attitude of my principal figure;" and Warner
proceeded once more to detail the particulars of his intended picture.
It must be confessed that he had chosen a fine though an arduous
subject: it was the Trial of Charles the First; and as the painter,
with the enthusiasm of his profession and the eloquence peculiar to
himself, dwelt upon the various expressions of the various forms which
that extraordinary judgment-court afforded, no wonder that Clarence
forgot, with the artist himself, the disadvantages Warner had to
encounter in the inexperience of an unregulated taste and an imperfect
professional education.




CHAPTER XIV.

All manners take a tincture from our own,
Or come discoloured through our passions shown.--POPE.

What! give up liberty, property, and, as the Gazeteer says, lie down
to be saddled with wooden shoes?--Vicar of Wakefield.

There was something in the melancholy and reflective character of
Warner resembling that of Mordaunt; had they lived in these days
perhaps both the artist and the philosopher had been poets. But (with
regard to the latter) at that time poetry was not the customary vent
for deep thought or passionate feeling. Gray, it is true, though
unjustly condemned as artificial and meretricious in his style, had
infused into the scanty works which he has bequeathed to immortality a
pathos and a richness foreign to the literature of the age; and,