PAINTERS AS THEY WERE. 285 



of the rest of their bodies. Ward would have hanged 

 himself if by mistake he had manufactured such beasts : 

 he might have copied, but he could not have conceived 

 such for the life of him. 



Stubbs certainly produced some clever pictures : 

 it has never been my good luck to see one of them, 

 so I only judge from hearsay and engravings from 

 him ; but, judging from many of those engravings, 

 they either did him injustice, or some of his pictures 

 were very mediocre indeed. Gilpin could paint a 

 certain kind of horse, and George Morland was true 

 to nature so far as a cart or butcher's horse went ; 

 but I suspect he would have made a queer animal of 

 Charles the Twelfth in training ; and, if report speaks 

 true, a queer animal was the painter himself. 



Sartorius was at one time the great painter of race- 

 horses and hunters, after old Seymour's time. One 

 merit those artists had, they put characteristic land- 

 scapes to their pictures ; but to these they added 

 from two to twenty couples of hounds, and a given 

 number of horses, all (if .galloping) resting on their 

 hind legs, and looking as if there they would rest for 

 ever. Look at the print from his (then thought) 

 famous picture of the match between Hambletonian 

 and Diamond. At the finish of the race, when we 

 expect to see every nerve in action, there the horses 

 are, and there they appear as if they had been since 

 the Flood, and there intended to remain for ever, the 

 horses behind them resting in their gallop on the toes 

 of their hind feet, like those we see as toys balanced 

 by a piece of curved wire stuck into their bellies by 

 one end, with a weight at the other, to make them 

 rise and fall without getting one inch forwarder. 



As a portrait painter, Sartorius would be content 



