with our fellow-citizens, and that in particular your business is to paint and not to dispute."
William Burke appears to have had less faith in the efficacy of advice, for after venturing a little on the same subject to Barry, he consolingly adds, he might as well have spared himself his labour, for if such was Barry's nature, it would always remain so—the event proved him the better philosopher. Barry, however, when disengaged from these petty contentions, set in vehemently to his studies, and investigated the great works of ancient and modern art, with profound and indefatigable attention. In his modes of study, as in every thing else, he was peculiar; his drawings from the antique were made by means of a patent delineator, a mechanical process which saves all trouble to the eye and band. Barry considered the spontaneous correctness of drawing, acquired by the habitoal exercise of those organs, a thing of small comparative importance; but by minutely dividing and subdividing, enlarging and diminishing, the studies made by the above-named method, he sought to establish in his mind an abstract canon of proportion.—Barry, indeed, delighted in the idealities of his art, and shrunk from the grossness of executive excellence: nevertheless, he made some copies of Titian, which satisfied his ambition, on the subject of colour; and if he was mistaken in supposing that the copyings of Titian alone can make a colourist, without perpetual recurrence to nature, he by no means stands alone in that error. But of his ardour and success in the study of those masters, whose qualities were more congenial to his own, Raphael and Michael Angelo, his subsequent works furnish an illustrious evidence.
He remained in Rome five years, and was elected during that period, a member of the Clementine Academy at Bologna, on which occasion he painted as his picture of reception, Philoctetes in the island of Lemnos. He returned to England in 1770, destitute of all but art, yet elate in the consciousness of his talents and acquirements, and panting for an opportunity of executing some great public work,
