youth, and they would be
looked on and bought up as curiosities. True it is that I took lessons
of oil-painting in youth from a little Jew animalcule, a smouch called
Burrell, a clever sensible creature though; but I could make no progress
either in painting or drawing. Nature denied me correctness of eye and
neatness of hand, yet I was very desirous to be a draughtsman at least,
and laboured harder to attain that point than at any other in my
recollection, to which I did not make some approaches. My oil-paintings
were to Miss ------ above commemorated what hers are to Claude Lorraine.
Yet Burrell was not useless to me altogether neither; he was a Prussian,
and I got from him many a long story of the battles of Frederic, in
whose armies his father had been a commissary, or perhaps a spy. I
remember his picturesque account of seeing a party of the Black Hussars
bringing in some forage carts which they had taken from a body of the
Cossacks, whom he described as lying on the top of the carts of hay,
mortally wounded, and, like the Dying Gladiator, eyeing their own blood
as it ran down through the straw. I afterwards took lessons from Walker,
whom we used to call Blue-beard. He was one of the most conceited
persons in the world, but a good teacher--one of the ugliest
countenances he had too--enough, as we say, to spean weans.[199] The
man was always extremely precise in the quality of everything about him,
his dress, accommodations, and everything else. He became insolvent,
poor man, and for some reason or other I attended the meeting of those
concerned in his affairs. Instead of ordinary accommodations for
writing, each of the persons present was equipped with a large sheet of
drawing paper and a swan's quill. It was mournfully ridiculous enough.
Skirving[200] made an admirable likeness of Walker, not a single scar or
mark of the smallpox which seamed his countenance, but the too accurate
brother of the brush had faithfully laid it down in longitude and
latitude. Poor Walker destroyed it (being in crayons) rather than let
the caricature of his ugliness appear at the sale of his effects. I did
learn myself to take some vile views from Nature. When Will Clerk and I
lived very much together, I used sometimes to make them under his
instruction. He to whom, as to all his family, art is a familiar
attribute, wondered at me as a Newfoundland dog would at a greyhound
which showed fear of the water.

Going down to Liddesdale once,