Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu/243

 Berry permitted him to consign this gem to the hands of a friend in a retired situation of life, who had few opportunities of showing it to others. He resumed his wonted drudgery, satisfied, we may suppose, with that secret consciousness of triumphant exertion, which, to some abstracted minds, is not to be increased, but rather spoilt, by the applause of the uninitiated multitude. For many years this ingenious man "narrowed his mind" to the cutting of heraldic seals, while in reality, he must have known that his genius fitted him for a competition with the highest triumphs of Italian art. When he was occasionally asked to undertake somewhat finer work, he generally found that, though he only demanded perhaps half the money which he could have earned in humbler work during the same space of time, yet even that was grudged by his employers; and he therefore found that mere considerations of worldly prudence demanded his almost exclusive attention to the ordinary walk of his profession.

Nevertheless, in the course of a few years, the impulse of genius so far overcame his scruples, that he executed various heads, any one of which would have been sufficient to ensure him fame among judges of excellence in this department of art Among these were heads of Thomson, author of "the Seasons," Mary Queen of Scots, Oliver Cromwell, Julius Caesar, a young Hercules, and Mr Hamilton of Bangour, the well-known poet. Of these only two were copies from the antique; and they were executed in the finest style of those celebrated entaglios. The young Hercules, in particular, possessed an unaffected plain simplicity, a union of youthful innocence with strength and dignity, which struck every beholder as most appropriate to that mythological personage, while it was, at the same time, the most difficult of all expressions to be hit off by the faithful imitator of nature. As an actor finds it much less difficult to imitate any extravagant violence of character, than to represent; with truth and perspicuity, the elegant ease of the gentleman; so the painter can much more easily delineate the most violent contortions of countenance, than that placid serenity, to express which requires a nice discrimination of such infinitely small degrees of variation in certain lineaments, as totally elude the observation of men, on whose minds nature has not impressed, with her irresistible hand, that exquisite perceptive faculty, which constitutes the essence of genius in the fine arts.

Berry possessed this perceptive faculty to a degree which almost proved an obstruction, rather than a help, in his professional career. In his best performances, he himself remarked defects which no one else perceived, and which he believed might have been overcome by greater exertion, if for that greater exertion he could have spared the necessary time. Thus, while others applauded his entaglios, he looked upon them with a morbid feeling of vexation, arising from the sense of that struggle which his immediate personal wants constantly maintained with the nobler impulses of art, and to which his situation in the world promised no speedy cessation. This gave him an aversion to the higher department of his art, which, though indulged to his own temporary comfort, and the advantage of his family, was most unfortunate for the world.

In spite of every disadvantage, the works of Mr Berry, few as they were in number, became gradually known in society at large; and some of his pieces were even brought into competition, by some distinguished cognoscenti, with those of Piccler at Rome, who had hitherto been the unapproached sovereign of this department of the arts. Although the experience of Piccler was that of a constant practitioner, while Mr Berry had only attempted a few pieces at long intervals in the course of a laborious life; although the former l ved in a country where every artificial object was attuned to the principles of art, while Mr Berry was reared in a soil remarkable for the absence of all such advantages; the latter was by many good judges placed above his Italian contemporary, The re-