For both accounts could not be true.  There were, then, but small grounds to hope that Allan Cunningham would have so revised his work, as to have done justice to Sir Joshua Reynolds.  Besides, after all, “respect for the dead” moves both ways.  The question is between the recently dead and the long since dead.  In the literary world, and in the world of art, both yet live; and the author of the Life has this advantage, that thousands read the “Family Library,” whilst but few, comparatively speaking, make themselves acquainted with Sir Joshua Reynolds and his works.  We revere this founder of our English school, and feel it due to the art we love, to condemn the ungenerous and sarcastic spirit of The Life, by Allan Cunningham.  And if the dead could have any interest in and guidance of things on earth, we can imagine no work that would be more pleasing to them, than the removal of even the slightest evils they may have inflicted; thus making restitution for them.  It is very evident throughout the “Lives,” that the author has a prejudice against, an absolute dislike to, Sir Joshua Reynolds.  We stay not to account for it.  There are men of some opinions who, whether from pride, or other feeling, have an antipathy to courtly manners, and what is called higher society:  jealous and suspicious lest they should not owe, and seen to owe, every thing to themselves, there is a constant and irritable desire to set aside, with a feigned, oftener than a real, contempt, the influence and the homage the world pays to superiority of rank, station, and education.  They would wish to have nothing above themselves.  How far such may have been the case with the writer of the “Lives,” we know not, totally unacquainted as we have ever been, but by his writings.  In them there appears very strongly marked this vulgar feeling.  He has stepped out of his way in other lives, such as those of Wilson and Gainsborough, to attack Sir Joshua by surmises and insinuations of meanness, blurring the fair character of his best acts.  The generous doings of the President were too notorious not to be admitted, but generally a sinister or selfish motive is insinuated.  His courtesy was unpleasing, while extreme coarseness met with a ready apologist.  In the several Lives of Sir Joshua Reynolds, there does not appear the slightest ground upon which to found a charge of meanness of character:  it is inconceivable how such should have ever been insinuated, while Northcote’s “Life” of him was in existence, and Northcote must have known him well.  He was most liberal in expenditure, as became his station, and the dignity which he was ambitiously desirous of conferring upon the art over which he presided.  To artists and others in their distresses he was most generous:  numerous, indeed, are the recorded instances; those unrecorded may be infinitely more numerous, for generosity was with him a habit.  In the teeth of Mr Cunningham’s insinuations we will extract from Northcote some passages