Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 1.djvu/470

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NOTES AND QUERIES. ui a. i. jm n, mo.

I shall hope to hear you have seen all you intended to see, & that you have benefitted much. Remember Rubens' excellence is principally a gigantic comprehension of the lowest parts of the Art, his handling only is perfect. Breadth, brightness, depth, are the elements of his Pictures ; and the reason why when hanging by others, they so completely overpower all ; his expressions of form are seldom decently elegant, selected, or truely grand ; at any time he would sacrifice expression, character, or form for purity of colour, and would never alter either, if they could not be altered but at the expence of colour ; this is an Error, but the Error of a great Genius, who felt the predominating influence of one part of the art ; but as perfection is the object of all men the errors of Genius must always be separated from their excellencies, in order to approach it. I am writing you a sermon. I have finished the Corner (?) figures as I intended, and am resting for a day or two with strained eyes. Kind remembrance to Chatfield.

Yours always, Dear Mayor,

B. R. HAYDON.

M. M. Mayor

Poste-restante Amsterdam

Pd 1/4.

After the address at the head of the letter, and before Mayor's name, are the words,

Mrs. Haydon begs her Compl m ts

written after the paper had been turned round, so that the words appear upside down.

Edward Chatfield (1800-39) was a pupil of Haydon, for whom see ' D.N.B., ? x. 141. Rubens lies buried in his own chapel in the church of St. Jacques at Antwerp. In ' Cymbeline,' IV. ii. 235, Arviragus, when the disguised Imogen is thought to be dead, says :

And let us, Polydore, though now our voices Have got the mannish crack, sing him to the

ground, As once our mother.

Shelley's voice, we know, was piercing and discordant. The picture to which Haydon refers was probably his large canvas ' The Raising of Lazarus,' given in 1868 to the National Gallery by R. E. Lofft.

In the ' Table -Talk * are several further notices of Shelley. To Lady Blessington (p. 383) Godwin " dispraised Shelley, and said his imagination was not sound, but false." This remark is characteristic of Godwin, who rarely omitted an opportunity of " dispraising " his over-generous son-in- law. On 23 Oct., 1825, Haydon says :

" Gisborne, a friend of Shelley, called on me to-day (290). He told me : 'I asked Shelley if he did not think he might have done more if he

had acted otherwise with his talents ? ' Shelley replied : ' Certainly ; he had made a mistake.' I put this down within two minutes of Gisborne- leaving me, because I think it important."

Shelley, it will be remembered, professed to endure John Gisborne (whom he regarded as a stupid bore) solely for his wife's sake. In 1799 Mrs. Gisborne, then Mrs. Reveley and a widow, had declined Godwin's offer of marriage. Elsewhere (268) the painter remarks :

" ' Religion and morality,' says Shelley, ' as- they now stand compose a practical code of misery and servitude.' This is untrue ; as they really and essentially are, they compose a code of tran- quility, freedom, and elevation of soul."

It will have been observed that in the above letter Haydon speaks of Shelley as a " little, delicate, shrivelled man." The first epithet refers, presumably, to the poet's slender appearance, and not to his height, for we know he was tall : whereas Haydon according to his son's testimony pos- sessed a short and sturdy figure. Only two genuine portraits of Shelley exist, and neither is satisfactory. The earlier, a miniature by the Due de Montpensier, was taken when he was thirteen or fourteen years of age, and, as pointed out by Dr. Richard Garnett, is authenticated by its strong and un- designed resemblance to miniatures of his- mother's family, the Pilfolds. The later portrait, now the property of the nation,, painted by Miss Amelia Curran at Rome in 1819, was left in a flat and unfinished state- But we may probably take as authentic the abundant brown hair, dark-blue eyes, slightly arched eyebrows, delicate aquiline nose, and oval face. His father, Sir Timothy, was slight of figure, tall, very fair, and blue- eyed, his mother, Elizabeth, Lady Shelley, akin to her husband, of a rare beauty which descended to her children. Their fine portraits by George Romney confirm the traditional likeness of the poet.

The beautiful drawing of Shelley by Clint was not from the life, but composed from a lost water-colour drawing by E.E. Williams and the Curran portrait. Resem- blances have been found with the portraits of Novalis, of Leicester's son Sir Robert Dudley, styled Duke of Northumberland and Earl of Warwick, and of Antonio Leisman in the Florentine Ritratti de' Pittori. The likeness traced between the portraits of Shelley and Dudley is curious because the poet's first cousin, Lord de Lisle and Dudley, was descended from Leicester through his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney's brother ; whereas, the poet, appa-