Since I first
entered the public lists, a very young man indeed, it has been my
constant fortune to number amongst my nearest and dearest friends
members of the Royal Academy who have been its grace and pride.
They have so dropped from my side one by one that I already, begin
to feel like the Spanish monk of whom Wilkie tells, who had grown
to believe that the only realities around him were the pictures
which he loved, and that all the moving life he saw, or ever had
seen, was a shadow and a dream.
For many years I was one of the two most intimate friends and most
constant companions of the late Mr. Maclise. Of his genius in his
chosen art I will venture to say nothing here, but of his
prodigious fertility of mind and wonderful wealth of intellect, I
may confidently assert that they would have made him, if he had
been so minded, at least as great a writer as he was a painter.
The gentlest and most modest of men, the freshest as to his
generous appreciation of young aspirants, and the frankest and
largest-hearted as to his peers, incapable of a sordid or ignoble
thought, gallantly sustaining the true dignity of his vocation,
without one grain of self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last
as at the first, "in wit a man, simplicity a child," no artist, of
whatsoever denomination, I make bold to say, ever went to his rest
leaving a golden memory more pure from dross, or having devoted
himself with a truer chivalry to the art goddess whom he
worshipped.
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