room."

Oh," said Cooper, "I thought perhaps the public would be calling it Scotland Yard if you went on at that rate!" Wilkie was dreadfully exercised at what he called the affront put upon him.

Apropos of the Chantrey Bequest, it may be stated that the great sculptor, who died in 1841, bequeathed the reversion of the greater part of his property (amounting to nearly £150,000) to the Royal Academy for the promotion of sculpture and painting; and that about £2000 is devoted annually to the purchase of works of art executed in Great Britain. The conditions of this trust are that commissions are not to be given to artists, but the works selected after completion by the committee of artists by whom the fund is administered.

A PORTRAIT OF ROBERT BURNS.

Near Barnard Castle, Durham, there is the Burns' Head Inn. The sign is a portrait of the poet, said to be an excellent likeness. At any rate, Mr. Morritt, uncle of the present owner of Rokeby, thought so, and once, when he had walked over there from Rokeby with Sir Walter

Scott, he pointed it out to him, and praised it as a highly successful bit of portraiture. "How long has it been there?" asked Scott. "Two

or three years," was the answer.

"Then," said

Scott, "take my word for it, it is not like Burns. Robbie Burns would not have stayed so long outside a public."

FUSELI AND HAYDON.

"My incessant application," writes Haydon in his autobiography, "was soon perceived by Fuseli, who coming in one day when I was at work, and all the other students were away, walked up to me, and said in the mildest voice, 'Why, when de devil do you dine?' and invited me to go back with him to dinner. Here I saw his sketches, the sublimity of which I deny. Evil was in him; he knew full well that he was wrong as to truth of imitation, and he kept palliating it under the excuse of 'the grand style.' He said a subject should interest, astonish, or move; if it done none of these, it was worth noding, by Gode.' He had a strong Swiss accent, and a guttural, energetic diction. This was not affectation in him. He swore roundly, a habit which he told me he had contracted from Dr. Armstrong. He was about

five feet five inches high, had a compact little form, stood firmly at his easel, painted with his left hand, never held his palette upon his thumb, but kept it upon his stone; and being very nearsighted and too vain to wear glasses, used to dab his beastly brush into the oil, and sweeping round the palette in the dark, take up a great lump of white, red, or blue, as might be, and plaster it over a shoulder or face. Sometimes in his blindness he would put a hideous smear of Prussian blue in his flesh, and then, perhaps, discovering his mistake, take a bit of red to deaden it, and then, prying close in, turn round to me and say, 'By Gode, dat's a fine purple! it's very like Corregio, by Gode!' and then, all of a sudden, he would burst out with a quotation from Homer, Tasso, Dante, Ovid, Virgil, or perhaps the 'Niebelungen,' and thunder round to me with 'Paint dat.'

TURNER, CONSTABLE, AND COOPER.

It is told of Turner that he did not consider his labours over when he had sent in his pictures to the exhibitions; he would wait till the hangers had done their work, and then on the varnishing-day would, by a few magical touches, so alter the tone of his work that all the neighbouring canvases

looked like foils carefully arranged to set off this one particular picture in the whole room. "He has been here and fired off a gun," said Constable on one occasion, when he found that the introduction at the last moment of a piece of scarlet about the size of a shilling into a grey seapiece of Turner's had completely killed the colour of his own picture, which represented a pageant of boats at the opening of Waterloo Bridge. On the opposite wall there hung in that same exhibition a picture of "Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace." Cooper, who was present, said to Constable, "A coal has bounced across the room from Jones's picture and set fire to Turner's sea."

RELICS OF GREAT ARTISTS.

At the sale of a collection of sketches and studies for portraits by the late Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A., which took place at Christie's in 1879, one of the most interesting items was the "sitter's chair," formerly the property of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and introduced in many of his pictures. It was afterwards the property of Sir Thomas Lawrence and Sir Martin Archer Shee. After a spirited competition it was purchased for the Royal Aca

demy by the present President, Sir F. Leighton, for £76.

Another artistic relic of Reynolds is in the possession of Mr. Roberson, artists' colourman, in Long Acre. This is a peculiarly shaped spade-like palette with a handle to it. On the broad part is written in ink, "This pallet belonged to James Northcote, R.A., and was given to me by his sister, Sunday evening, May 14, 1834. His principal pictures were painted off it. J. CAWSE."

It is further recorded that Cawse, a now-forgotten artist, on calling one day on Northcote, found him mending the palette, and was told by Northcote that Sir Joshua Reynolds had given it to him. The relic was purchased by the late Mr. Charles Roberson from Cawse.

Mr. Cribb, carver and gilder, King Street, Covent Garden, had in his possession another of Sir Joshua's palettes. It descended to Mr. Cribb from his father, who received it from Reynolds's niece, the Marchioness of Thomond. It is described as being of plain mahogany, measures II inches by 7 inches, oblong in form, with a sort of loop handle; in fact, very much resembling the one to be seen in Longacre. Cunningham tells us that Sir Joshua held his palettes by a