1829.] Affairs in General. 7 
talent, and variety of power. He may not have turned his art to the 
most dextrous advantage by his personal management ; for every one 
knows how large a share of professional success depends on causes which 
have little to do with professional ability. The cultivation of patrons, 
the blandishments of those stirring individuals who direct the tastes of 
the opulent, and personal and perpetual deference to the leading mem- 
bers of the profession, are among those essentials, for the want of which 
the Barrys of the English school lived in struggle, and left nothing but 
a name for themselves, and a stain of ingratitude on their country. 
Haydon, unluckily for his prospects, began his career with a rash 
avowal of being his own sole guide, of determining to bring a higher 
style of art among us, and of reforming the presumed blunders of the 
Royal Academy. Thus, at his first step, he laid the foundation for his 
ruin. Numbers will break down any strength; and the individual who 
goes to war with corporations will reap but few triumphs. How- 
ever, this rashness has been for some time publicly at an end, and 
Haydon has become an exhibitor at Somerset House. 
The more important consideration is, whether a man, capable of the 
vigorous and rapid productiveness which characterize his pencil, ought to 
be suffered to sink. We live in the richest country of Europe. We spend, 
and we are in the right to spend, vast sums on public decoration. We 
see a hundred thousand pounds expended on amansion for a royal duke, 
and no one grudges it ; half a million of money is laid out ona royal 
palace, and no one murmurs, except at the barbarous want of taste, which 
renders it so unworthy of a British king. The directors of our National 
Gallery give fifty thousand pounds to a merchant for a few old pictures ; 
three thousand pounds are paid for a Correggio six inches long ; and 
five thousand for a pair of Caraccis. Not that we object to this, 
nor join in the very general doubts of originality, and the very strong 
clamour about mysticism in those transactions. But, we say, that the 
tenth of this money employed in commissions to capable artists, would 
produce ten times the public advantage; that more service would be 
rendered to the Arts in England, by shewing that a man who distin- 
guished himself in them was sure of public employment, than could be 
rendered by acres of walls covered with all that Raphael and Reubens 
ever painted ; that the kindling of emulation is the only way to national 
excellence ; and that the reward conferred on one able artist by this 
public employment, and the evidence that, by the historic pencil, a for- 
tune could be made, would more decidedly rouse many a latent artist to a 
vigour of which he had been unconscious, and raise a generation of 
great historic painters, than all the stars and medals that ever decorated 
the bosoms of all the presidents of the Academy. 
__ Let, then, the government of England do what the government of 
France does every year. Let commissions for subjects on the memo- 
rable scenes of national history be given to our leading artists, and our 
royal palaces and public halls be hung with them, as in France. The 
taste for this most attractive and admirable species of ornament would 
rapidly spread. When London had seen the records of her early honours 
suspended in her halls, the provinces would offer an inexhaustible suc- 
cession of the finest themes for the painter. The old annals of provin- 
cial loyalty, bravery, and suffering—the heroic struggles of the civil war 
—the deeper, yet still more interesting, struggles of the times, when the 
martyrs of the Reformation fought the patient battle of the faith, and 
M.M. New Scries—Vou. VII. No. 37. L 
