to humbler people, which Johnson certified?  Why did he not narrate the robbery of the black servant, and his kindness to the humblest and the most wretched?  What was fifty guineas to poor De Gree?  Who were the humbler people to whom he denied his bounty?  And is the fair fame, the honest reputation—­the honourable reputation, we should say—­of such a man as Sir Joshua Reynolds—­such as he has been proved to be—­such as not only such men as Burke and Johnson knew him, but such as his pupil and inmate Northcote knew him—­to be vilified by a low-minded biography, the dirty ingredients of which are raked up from lying mouths, or, at least, incapable of judging of such a character—­from the lips of servants, whose idle tales of masters who discard them, it is the common usage of the decent, not to say well-bred world, to pay no attention to—­not to listen to—­and whom none hear but the vulgar-curious, or the slanderous?  But if a servant’s evidence must be taken, the fact of the exhibition of Sir Joshua’s works for his servant Kirkly should have been enough—­to say nothing here of his black servant.  But the story of Kirkly is mentioned—­and how mentioned?  To rake up a malevolent or a thoughtless squib of the day, to make it appear that Sir Joshua shared in the gains of an exhibition ostensibly given to his servant.  The joke is noticed by Northcote, and the exhibition, thus:—­“The private exhibition of 1791, in the Haymarket, has been already mentioned, and some notice taken of it by a wicked wit, who, at the time, wished to insinuate that Sir Joshua was a partaker in the profits.  But this was not the truth; neither do I believe there were any profits to share.  However, these lines from Hudibras were inserted in a morning paper, together with some observations on the exhibition of pictures collected by the knight—­

    ’A squire he had whose name was Ralph
    Who in the adventure went his half,’

thus gaily making a sacrifice of truth to a joke.”  It is very evident that this was a mere newspaper squib, and suggested by the “knight and his squire Ralph;” but Cunningham so gives it as “the opinion of many,” and with rather more than a suspicion of its truth.  “Sir Joshua made an exhibition of them in the Haymarket, for the advantage of his faithful servant Ralph Kirkly; but our painter’s well-known love of gain excited public suspicion; he was considered by many as a partaker in the profits, and reproached by the application of two lines from Hudibras.”—­P. 117.  But this report from a servant is evidently no servant’s report at all, as far as the words go:  they are redolent throughout of the peculiar satire of the author of the “Lives,” who so loves point and antithesis, who tells us Sir Joshua “poured” out his wines, (the distribution of which he had otherwise spoken of,) that the stint to the servants may have its fullest opposition.  And again, as to the humbler, does he not contradict himself?  He prefaces the fact that Sir Joshua gave a hundred