. He seemed to
have some feeling that time for him was not to be long--that life was
passing quickly by, almost too quickly to give him time to realise his
new home happiness, to give him strength to grasp his work. He was no
rapid painter, instinctively feeling his light and colour and action,
and seizing the moment's suggestion, but anxious, laborious, and
involved in that sad struggle in which some people pass their lives, for
ever disappointed. Opie's portraits seem to have been superior to his
compositions, which were well painted, 'but unimaginative and
commonplace,' says a painter of our own time, whose own work quickens
with that mysterious soul which some pictures (as indeed some human
beings) seem to be entirely without.

'During the nine years that I was his wife,' says Mrs. Opie, 'I never
saw him satisfied with any one of his productions. Often, very often, he
has entered my sitting-room, and, throwing himself down in an agony of
despondence upon the sofa, exclaimed, "I shall never be a painter!"'

He was a wise and feeling critic, however great his shortcomings as a
painter may have been. His lectures are admirable; full of real thought
and good judgment. Sir James Mackintosh places them beyond Reynolds's in
some ways.

'If there were no difficulties every one would be a painter,' says Opie,
and he goes on to point out what a painter's object should be--'the
discovery or conception of perfect ideas of things; nature in its
purest and most essential form rising from the species to the genus, the
highest and ultimate exertion of human genius.' For him it was no
grievance that a painter's life should be one long and serious effort.
'If you are wanting to yourselves, rule may be multiplied upon rule and
precept upon precept in vain.' Some of his remarks might be thought
still to apply in many cases, no less than they did a hundred years ago,
when he complained of those green-sick lovers of chalk, brick-dust,
charcoal and old tapestry, who are so ready to decry the merits of
colouring and to set it down as a kind of superfluity. It is curious to
contrast Opie's style in literature with that of his wife, who belongs
to the entirely past generation which she reflected, whereas he wrote
from his own original impressions, saying those things which struck him
as forcibly then as they strike us now. 'Father and Daughter' was Mrs.
Opie's first acknowledged book. It was published in 1801, and the author
writes modest