GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
Even those most strongly opposed to his method, manner, and 
style—if they judge him only from the amount, and the serious 
quality of the work he left behind him—and consider how far he 
carried out his own ideals—will generally be found to admit that 
if there were greater painters in the latter half of the nineteenth 
century, there was no greater all-round artist, and certainly there 
was no other who, by common consent—owing to a rare union of 
intellectual and physical gifts—seemed so marked out by nature 
for his great position—was born to be President of the Royal 
Academy. . 
Singularly handsome, of distinguished presence, genial in 
manner, speaking fluently many tongues; a much-travelled man 
who had lived long in several Continental cities ; a thoughtful and 
eloquent speaker, and moreover a ready one—for I myself have 
heard him speak at a moment’s notice, effectively and well— 
Frederick Leighton had the high-bred air, and the accomplishments, 
of a finished courtier. But the charm of voice and smile, the 
graces of manner and of mind, that attracted all who came near 
him, were not learnt in courts—for though of gentle blood, he 
was not high-born ; and the President’s courtliness was the out- 
come of a courtesy that was innate. 
Born at Scarborough in 1830, he was the grandson of a man who, 
during two reigns, had been physician to the court of St. Peters- 
burg. His father also was a medical man, one who might have 
made in medicine a greater mark than he did, had not a cold caught 
at the outset of his career, just after he had taken his Edinburgh 
degree—left him partially deaf. Frederick was the eldest child, 
an only son; he had two sisters, one of whom, the late Mrs. Suther- 
land Orr, made some mark in literature; the remaining sister. 
Mrs. Matthews, survives him. 
The family seems to have been of a roving inclination, for we 
hear of them as resident for a time in Florence, Rome, Paris, anc 
Frankfort ; and the cosmopolitan tastes and habits thus acquired 
by the young Frederick, no doubt stood him in good stead in the 
part he afterwards so admirably played in London society; fo! 
though insularity may assist in forming the individuality of an artis’ 
who is destined ultimately to become a pillar of a national schoo 
of painting—it is by no means an asset in the equipment of on 
whose business it is to represent that school in the world at large 
298 
