century appear here in great force. With the faces of most of them the
world is familiar. Here are six of the Kit-Kat Club portraits that
were painted for Jacob Tonson. First in order Tonson himself, the very
personification of the nourishing publisher and patron of authors, with
the pleasant air of the happy discoverer of genius, and the maker of its
fortune as well as of his own. He holds a folio copy of "Paradise Lost"; it
is Tonson patting Milton on the back. Dryden, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Steele,
Addison, and Lord Chancellor Somers are the other five of these celebrated
portraits. What a congress of wits! But we have besides, Atterbury, and
Pope, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Prior, and Tickell, and Swift.
Pope's face, as given in Kneller's portrait, (which recalls the poet's
stolen complimentary verse to the painter,) has a sad and weary look, and
is marked by that pallor, and that peculiar hollowness of eye and cheek,
which often accompany bodily deformity. Swift's face betrays but little
of the bitterness of his soul; but it was painted in his best days,
before the cloud of darkness had begun to settle down upon him. It is the
portrait of him as he was in London, among his set,--not as he was in the
half-banishment of his Irish life.

The end of the century brings us to other familiar portraits, and at length
to portraits painted by great native artists. Gainsborough and Reynolds
appear in full rivalry. Here are Gainsborough's Johnson, the well-known
profile portrait, and Sir Joshua's Boswell; Gainsborough's Garrick, a most
delightful portrait of Garrick's pleasantest expression, and Sir Joshua's
Gibbon, which looks as ugly and as conceited as the little man himself.
One of Reynolds's most pleasing portraits is his likeness of himself in
spectacles. It has suffered from the fading of colors and the cracking of
the paint, as so many of Sir Joshua's best pictures have done; but it still
presents him amiable, cultivated, and unpretending, the accomplished artist
and the kindly friend, and affords the best possible illustration of the