Barry's enthusiastic temper appears, as might have been expected, to have caught new ardour from the contact of congenial minds, during his short residence in London. The following extract from one of his letters during that period, to his friend Dr. Hugh, deserves to be inscribed in characters of adamant, for the edification of all students in all professions:—My hopes are grounded, in a most unwearied intense application; I every day centre more and more upon my art; I give myself totally to it, and, except honour and conscience, am determined to renounce every thing else."
This power of intense application, Barry did certainly possess; but he was very deficient in another qualification, equally indispensable in the enterprises of genius,—he wanted that cool, abstracted magnaminity, which, while it absorbs the man in his pursuits, secures his temper against petty interruptions, the clamours of enemies, the admonitions of friends, hints, sneers, prognostics, and the whole etcætera of insignificancies, which every man finds himself beset with, who starts forth from the multitude, and marks out for himself a career of ambition beyond their sympathy or comprehension. Barry found at Rome, a set of persons who, at that time at least, were as natural adjuncts to the circles of art, as butterflies and reptiles to a flower garden; wealthy simpletons who came to purchase taste and pictures, and needy knaves who were still more ready to sell those articles. With this latter class of persons, it is a professional maxim to deny merit to all living artists: Barry received this condemnation among the rest; but instead of refuting his calumniators by the silent energies of his pencil, he impoliticly engaged them with their own weapons, and became an infinite sufferer, in a warfare of dispute, sarcasm, and abuse. His friends, the Burkes, indeed, seem to have been suspicious, that Barry, even without the spur of provocation, had a pre-disposition to this species of contest, and Edmund Burke addressed to him at this time, a letter on the subject, which we subjoin, as
