thing that Wilkie had hitherto produced. And as yet, with all this full-grown
celebrity, he had only reached the age of twenty-three! But the four years he
had spent in London had been years of constant occupation and steady progress; and now, that he had attained such excellence in his art, and so high a
reputation, he was the same modest, unassuming, and painstaking student
which he had been at his first entrance into the metropolis ; and not a day, no,
not an hour of abatement could he perceived in the diligence with which he
still continued at his task of self-improvement, or the docility with which he
received every suggestion that tended to promote it. All this is fully attested
by the extracts that have been published from his London Journal of this
period. From these we find that he still attended the academy, and took lessons as a pupil. At home, he usually painted five hours a-day; and if visited
in the midst of work, he conversed with his visitors, while his hand and eye
were still busied with the canvas. Every kind of model also was used in his occupation; for he was of opinion, that however imagination might aggrandize
the work of the painter, nature must be his authority and exemplar. When the day's work of the studio was finished, his ramble for recreation or pleasure
was still in subservience to his pursuits; and thus his visits were to picture galleries and artists; his rambles into the country were in quest of picturesque cottages and their simple inhabitants; and even his walks in the streets were
turned to profitable account, with here a face and there an attitude, amidst the ceaselessly revolving panorama. His chief indulgence in an evening was to repair
to the theatre, where he enjoyed a rich treat, not merely in the play itself, but in the attitudes of the best performers, where grace and nature were combined
in the living delineations of the drama. And still, go where he might, his affectionate heart never seems to have lost sight of his native home; and it
may be fairly questioned, whether the delight which his success occasioned in
the manse of Cults was not as high a recompense, in his estimation, as anything that fame could bestow. There is something beautiful and touching in
the fact, that while he was fighting his up-hill way in London, through the
difficulties of scanty payments, his chief anxiety, besides that of becoming a
great painter, was to be able to present his sister Helen with a pianoforte. His letters to his sister and parents at this time are the best of all his portraits.
The year 1808 was a busy year with Wilkie, as he was then employed upon three paintings, each excellent in its kind, and well fitted to advance his reputation. The chief of these, known as "The Sick Lady," was in a higher style of art than he had hitherto attempted, as well as of a very different character; it was an entire abandonment of humble and Scottish life and quiet humour, in which he had hitherto been without a rival, in favour of the graceful, the sentimental, and pathetic. The pains which he bestowed upon this picture, the anxiety with which he touched and retouched it, and the time that was suffered to elapse before it was completed, were the proper accompaniments of this bold attempt in a new field. It is enough to say, that this production, while equal to all its predecessors in point of artistic excellence, was not regarded with the same admiration. And how could it be otherwise? It was in Scottish life that the secret of Wilkie's strength lay, for there he painted as no other man could paint; but when he left this walk, of which he was so exclusively the master, and entered into that of the English artist, he could even at the best do nothing more than others had done before him. It was Burns abandoning his native streams and native dialect, for the banks of the Thames,
