eam on
us from the gifted artist's pencil.

But Life contains--thanks be--not only coarse, distorted types of
humanity, exaggerations of foolish fashion, and political antagonisms,
but grace and beauty, even with the changing form of the time-spirit;
and it is just here that Rowlandson infinitely surpasses those
contemporaries whom we studied in our last chapter. His female figures
have often that rich English beauty which we find in Reynolds, Hoppner,
or sometimes in Morland; and his landscape has qualities of very
exceptional merit. He might, we are frequently tempted to think, have
been a painter worthy to take a front rank even in that magnificent
English eighteenth-century school, which included Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Romney, Hoppner, among its glories; but as we come to
study his life we shall find in the _insouciance_ of his character, in
the very facility of his genius, the causes which made him--not, indeed,
entirely to our loss--only the greatest caricaturist of his time.

As a boy already, at Dr. Barrow's academy in Soho, he had attracted
notice by his humorous sketches of his fellow pupils; and in his
sixteenth year he went to Paris at the invitation of his aunt, a Mlle.
Chatelier, with the object of pursuing art study in that city. He had
already been admitted as a student in the Royal Academy; and his life
studies in Paris are said to have possessed great merit. Paris itself at
this time (about 1772-4), with Louis XV. still on the throne, must have
been very fascinating to the young English lad, living with a relative
who treated him with affection and generosity, in the first
consciousness too of his genius, in the midst of a most brilliant
capital, and with every prospect of fortune waiting for him. These years
left, without doubt, an indelible impression on his mind. Mr. Grego, an
authority on this artist as well as Gillray, expresses this[12] very
happily when he says: "It was the more romantic Paris of Sterne that
Rowlandson first viewed, and he seems to have recognised and noted down
the characteristics of the same typical personages described by
'Yorick'; their two satirical points of view were identical. It was
indeed the ideal artistic centre: Fragonard, Lavrience, Eisen, St. Aubin,
and the school of followers of Boucher and Lancret--elegant triflers in
their way, but unequalled for dash and brilliancy--were the leading
spirits as Rowlandson imbibed his first inspiration from these
attractive f