effort or so, but soon found his legitimate field. With the £10,000 brought him by his wife in 1811, he provided himself with house, studio, offices, marble, &c., like a prudent speculator. From the epoch of his bust of Horne Tooke – an important patron to him – dates his success. This brought him into notice. Commissions thenceforward flowed in. The remainder of his life was a course of regular labor, relieved by constant hospitality and the periodic relaxation of country visits, and his favorite amusement, angling: interspersed with such occurrences as the visit to Italy; a few other continental trips; the erection, at a cost of £20,000, of a new house and offices, adapted to the growing largeness of his dealings, and his knighthood. With characteristic shrewdness, he early avoided committing himself to any political or party opinions. This, his prosperity, and his common-sense rendered him a great favorite with the English aristocracy. But too often, indeed, is the inane world of aristocratic Dilettantism felt hovering dimly near, as we read these pages. His large income and social disposition induced him to keep a hospitable house. And it was part of his tact to secure, without much reading, varied average knowledge, by frequent intercourse with men of science and letters. During the last two years of his life, his health rapidly and wholly gave way: the ordinary fate of his class, the hard workers and social livers. He was in the maturity of middle age, on his sudden death in 1841.
This course is as much that of a man of business as of an artist. Yet Chantrey's was a truly estimable, though no exalted, or rare character. There was a native dignity, a reality, an English genuineness about the man, legible in his whole life, and very engaging; even amid the chaotic adumbrations of the present biography. He was a favorable sample of a class not uncommon among us, the prosperous men who have risen through their own efforts, and deservedly. Generous, frank, hearty he was; above all, eminently direct in his dealings and character. One of his distinguishing features as a man, and as one of the class just mentioned, was his honest pride in his origin and progress in life. Without self-complacency, a manly consciousness of his true relations to the world pervaded him. The taint of flunkeyism in his position so facile to catch, touched him not. That respect for the intrinsic and essential, in character and position, his early circumstances naturally inspired, was never forsaken for worship of the privileged caste which favored and surrounded him.
One of those receiving freely and spending freely, he showed his sense of the value of money by its liberal devotion to the enjoyment of himself and all around. Ever open to tales of distress, he was the frequent dupe of his kind impulses. To his brother artists, he was generous in more ways than that of hospitality. Few earning a large income have manifested a better title thereto, by their use of it. In a profession inevitably unequal in the attainment of the prizes of fortune, compensation for the direction of so large a share into one or two fashionable channels, is found in so genial a worldly head of it as Chantrey. His generosity bordered on lavishness; yet even here, his prudence did not wholly forsake him. He left a large property; bequeathed, after Lady Chantrey, to the Royal Academy in trust, for purposes of doubtful judiciousness, but unquestionable good intention; in the way of fostering the "higher branches of art."
Rough and free in his manners, he was as full of bonhommie as good feeling. His letters are instinct with the heartiness and good fellowship of the man, and have a very agreeable freshness, and freedom from effort, if also, from any claims in the matter of thought.
In person, Chantrey did not belie his inner self. Mr. Jones, his biographer, indeed, gives us to understand, in one place, he resembled Shakspeare; in another, that it was Socrates he was like; and thereon, would have us accept a deeper similarity, of mind, to the Greek philosopher! A notion nearer the mark, is graphically supplied by his friend Thomson, when he begins his letter with a red wafer stuck on the paper; eyes, nose, mouth, &c., given in black. The symbol so pleased the sculptor, he adopted it himself as an occasional jocose signature.
Chantrey's intellect was a limited but emphatically capable, if not a very elevated one; ready at command and certain. All he said or did was, as far as it went, to the purpose. Altogether practical was the whole man. The sagacity of a sublimated common sense, was his prevailing characteristic. His mind was a perceptive one, not thoughtful or intense; making use of all that came in his way; gleaning information; receiving results, and applying them shrewdly. He attained proficiency in all he undertook, whether it were wood-carving, painting, portrait-busts, fishing, shooting. Without his range, were it but one step, he was helpless. But then, as a rule, he took care never to advance that step. And this was easy to him; for he was averse to all beyond the literal, and the every-day. The singular, the eccentric, in thought, manner of art, way of wearing one's hair, or any other department, he detested. "Let us stick to the broad, common high-way, and do our best there," was the instinctive feeling of the man. He was haunted by no unattainable, ever-retreating, fair ideals. No dreaming aspirations, or indefinite yearnings, had part in his life. His somewhat extreme, and in Mr. Jones's hands, quite over-done devotion to "simplicity," was very characteristic; in unison with that really satisfactory in him, but pointing to his wants, his restrictedness of feeling and unimaginativeness.
The same practical tendency and restriction of effort to things within reach, the sagacious, unerringly successful application of himself to the certain and definite, characterize his art: in the artist, ever the blossom and result of the whole man. Emphatic fulfillment does his success afford of the celebrated apophthegm of Mulready, "Know what you have to do, and do it." He did not spend himself on false aims, nor once lose himself in a wrong track. Having early ascertained his true field, portraiture, he consistently adhered to it, notwithstanding all "advice of friends;" though far from lacking ambition, or high ideas of the so-called higher branches. In this, his history is especially instructive, worthy of heed. He was faithful to the light that was in him. And in better times of art he might have been a still better artist.
SAILING IN THE AIR. – HISTORY OF AERONAUTICS
In the history of aeronautics, the name of Mr. Charles Green, who first turned his attention to the art in 1821, occupies a prominent place. To him the art is indebted for the introduction of carbureted-hydrogen, or coal gas, as the means of inflating balloons. Great as was the improvement effected by the substitution of hydrogen gas for rarefied air, there are serious disadvantages connected with the use of that gas. In the first place, it is procured at vast expense; and, in the second place, it is difficult to obtain it in sufficient quantity, several days of watchful anxiety having been often expended in the vain endeavor to generate a sufficiency of the gas, which, on account of the subtilty of its particles, and its strong affinity for those of the surrounding atmosphere, continued to escape almost as fast as it was produced. Perplexed at the outset with these difficulties and inconveniencies, which had not only rendered experiments comparatively rare, but even threatened the art with premature extinction, Mr. Green conceived that if coal gas, which is much cheaper and can be generated with much greater facility than hydrogen, could be employed for the purpose of inflation, an important object would be gained. To put the truth of his theory to the test, he prepared a balloon, which he inflated with coal gas, and made a successful ascent from the Green Park, on the day of the coronation of George IV. He has subsequently made some hundreds of ascensions from the metropolis, and various other parts of the empire, with balloons so inflated; and, from the year 1821, coal gas has been very generally used in experiments of this nature. Besides its economy and easy production, it has the advantage of being more easily retained than hydrogen, which, for the reasons already given, is much more readily dissipated.
The ingenuity of Mr. Green has been exerted with the view of discovering other improvements in the art of aerial navigation. One great obstacle to the successful practice in the art is, the difficulty of maintaining the power of the balloon for any length of time undiminished in its progress through the air. It is ascertained by the uniform experience of aeronauts, that, between the earth and two miles above the level of the sea, a variety of currents exist, some blowing in one direction and some in another; and when the aeronaut has risen to the elevation where he meets with a current that will waft him in the desired direction, it is of importance for him to be able to preserve that elevation. But the balloon, in consequence of the increase or diminution of weight to which it
