proach of want of natural warmth, uniting much stateliness with little passion.’ This is, no doubt, to some extent, true of some of his imaginative works, such as his ‘Abraham's Sacrifice,’ ‘Samuel and Eli,’ ‘Hagar and Ishmael,’ and ‘The Red Cross Knight;’ but his age was not favourable to the freedom and realistic force which marked the treatment of similar subjects by the old masters, and which are justly demanded from the modern school. In colouring Copley avoided the opaque and monotonous smoothness of West. He always kept nature before him, and had no fear, as many of his contemporaries had, that she ‘would put him out.’ Many of his best pictures have gone to America; but his merits being now better appreciated in England, those that remain with us are not likely to leave the country. His portrait, a fine work by Gilbert Stewart, engraved in Cunningham's ‘Lives of the Painters,’ where it is erroneously ascribed to Gainsborough, is that of a man of marked character, of a contemplative and dreamy disposition, and at the same time of great tenacity of purpose. It is now in the possession of Lady Lyndhurst.
[Domestic and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley, Boston, U.S., 1884, by Mrs. Martha Badcock Amory, daughter of Copley's eldest daughter, Mrs. Greene; Cunningham's Lives of the Painters, &c., ed. 1833, vol. v.; Sketch of the Life and List of some of the Works of John Singleton Copley, by Augustus Thorndike Perkins, Boston, U.S., 1873; Life of Lord Lyndhurst, by Sir Theodore Martin; family papers.]
COPLEY, JOHN SINGLETON, the younger, Lord Lyndhurst (1772–1863), lord chancellor, son of John Singleton Copley the elder [q. v.], and of his wife, Mary Farnum Clarke, was born in Boston, U.S., on 21 May 1772. He was brought over by his mother to England in June 1775, along with two sisters. His father had come to Europe in 1774. His uncle, Mr. Clarke, having become obnoxious to his fellow-citizens from his attachment to the English government, had been compelled to fly for safety to Canada. The position of Copley's wife and children in Boston had become so unpleasant, and the prospects of Copley himself as an artist, should he return to America, were so doubtful, that Mrs. Copley decided on removing to London, where friends and relatives were already settled, and a career as an artist awaited her husband on his return from abroad. The family first lived in a house in Leicester Fields, from the windows of which Lord Lyndhurst remembered to have seen the Gordon riots in June 1780. A few years afterwards they removed to 25 George Street, Hanover Square, where the elder Copley resided till his death in 1815, where also his widow died at the ripe age of ninety-one in 1836, and where Lord Lyndhurst, except for a short interval, lived till his death in 1863. Young Copley, according to family tradition, was full of vivacity and humour—qualities which he carried into his future life. When friends from America, to which his eldest sister returned on her marriage, carried back to him in his old age the tales they had heard of his boyish pranks, which used to provoke his father into saying, ‘You'll be a boy, Jack, all your life!’ the aged ex-chancellor would answer with a smile, ‘Well, I believe my father was right there.’ He was of a sweet, loving temper, and his pleasant way of looking at things was a welcome element in contrast with the anxious and meditative cast of his father's mind, and the somewhat serious temperament of his mother. ‘I am naturally a friend to gaiety,’ he writes in 1791; ‘I love to see what is to be seen’—a characteristic which coloured all his life. He was devoted to his parents, and in their happy and well-regulated home he acquired the simplicity of tastes and the habit of strong family attachment for which he was conspicuous through life. His education was begun at the private school in Chiswick of Dr. Horne, of whom Lord Lyndhurst in his ninety-first year recorded that he was ‘a good classical scholar, and infused into his pupils a fair proportion of Latin and Greek.’ Dr. Horne thought highly of his pupil, writing of him (23 Nov. 1789) as ‘a prodigiously improved young man.’ Early he acquired the habit, for which he was celebrated in after life, of thoroughly mastering and fixing with precision in his memory whatever engaged his attention, whether in science or in literature. When repeating his lessons in the classics to his sister, he used to say, ‘No matter whether you understand the text or not, be sure I make no mistake in a single word, or even in an accent.’ For mathematics, and also for mechanical science, he early showed a marked aptitude. He had no gift for the painter's art, but living as he did in the midst of artists, and delighting in the results of their labours, he gladly availed himself of his opportunities of attending the lectures on art of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Barry, and others. He used to tell of being present at one of Reynolds's lectures, when, an alarm having arisen that the floor was about to give way, Burke, who was there, appealed to the audience to be calm, and not to accelerate the catastrophe by a rush. In these early days he took a keen interest in the progress of art and in the prosperity of the Royal Academy. How
