and flowers, came over in 1721, and would have been thought a great master in that way, if his brother had never appeared.* Old Baptist had more freedom than John Huysum, but no man ever yet approached to the finishing and roundness of the latter. James lived a year or two with Sir Robert Walpole at Chelsea, and copied many pieces of Michael Angelo Caravaggio, Claud Lorrain, Gaspar, and other masters, which are now over the doors and chimnies in the attic story at Houghton; but his drunken dissolute conduct occasioned his being dismissed.

JAMES MAUBERT

distinguished himself by copying all the portraits he could meet with of English poets, some of which he painted in small ovals. Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Pope, and some others, he painted from the life. He died at the end of 1746. Vertue says he mightily adorned his pictures with flowers, honey-suckles, &c.

PESNE,

a Parisian, who had studied at Rome, and been

[Descamps, t. iv. p. 331, gives equal praise to both these brothers. He copied the works of John Van Huysum so exactly that they were sold for 40 and 50 guineas a pair, and encreased in price as his brother's originals did. He likewise composed, himself, most beautifully.]

[At Strawberry-Hill is a small whole length of Dryden.]

painter to the King of Prussia, grandfather of the present King. He came hither in 1724, and drew some of the Royal Family, but in the gawdy style of his own country, which did not at that time succeed here.

JOHN STEVENS,

a landscape-painter, who chiefly imitated Vandiest, painted small pictures, but was mostly employed for pieces over doors and chimnies. He died in 1722.

JOHN SMIBERT,

of Edinburgh, was born about 1684, and served his time with a common house-painter; but eager to handle a pencil in a more elevated style, he came to London, where however for subsistence he was forced to content himself at first with working for coach-painters. It was a little rise to be employed in copying for dealers, and from thence he obtained admittance into the academy. His efforts and ardour at last carried him to Italy, where he spent three years in copying portraits of Raphael, Titian, Vandyck, and Rubens, and improved enough to meet with much business at his return. When his industry and abilities had thus surmounted the asperities of his fortune, he was tempted against the persuasion of his friends to embark in the uncertain but amusing scheme of the famous Dean Berkeley, afterwards Bishop of

Cloyne, whose benevolent heart was then warmly set on the erection of an universal college of science and arts in Bermudas, for the instruction of heathen children in christian duties and civil knowledge. Smibert, a silent and modest man, who abhorred the finesse of some of his profession, was enchanted with a plan that he thought promised him tranquillity and honest subsistence in a healthful Elysian climate,* and in spite of remonstrances engaged with the Dean, whose zeal had ranged the favour of the court on his side. The king's death dispelled the vision. Smibert however, who had set sail, found it convenient or had not resolution enough to proceed, but settled at Boston in New England, where he succeeded to his wish, and married a woman with a considerable fortune, whom he left a widow with two children in March 1751. A panegyric on him, written there, was printed here in the Courant, 1730. Vertue, in whose notes I find these particulars, mentions another painter of the same

* One may conceive too how a man so devoted to his art, must have been animated, when the Dean's enthusiasm and eloquence painted to his imagination a new theatre of prospects, rich, warm, and glowing with scenery, which no pencil had yet made cheap and common by a sameness of thinking and imagination. As our disputes and politics have travelled to America, is it not probable that poetry and painting too will revive amidst those extensive tracts as they increase in opulence and empire, and where the stores of nature are so various, so magnificent, and so new?