and much misrepresented potentate
ever seems to have devised.

What matter? If he has lost Ajib, he has
still Zorilda. And his furtress, of which we
now see the external defences, being—as he
himself informs the Jurgian army (drawn up
about two feet from his nose) "impregnable"—
it is manifest that the catching of such a Tartar
as Timour will be attended with no small
difficulty.

The furtress, differing in some respects from
fortresses constructed on the system of Vauban,
presents the peculiar feature of a moat inside,
instead of outside, the walls; and, upon the
whole, has more the aspect of a beaver's dam
than a place of any considerable strength.
This, perhaps, accounts for a certain indifference
in the manner of the besieging force, who,
entirely weaponless, and standing in a loose
semicircle, bestow their undivided attention
on the public.

There is room on the ramparts for several
persons, and from thence, accordingly, Timour,
attended by Zorilda, Oglou, and the garrison
(consisting of a faithful halberdier), makes his
final appeal to posterity. He will fight to the
last—and even longer—and, if conquered, burn
the furtress, and all within it.

The noble defiance is yet on the hero's lips,
when an incident—unparalleled, so far as we
are aware, in the annals of war—comes to
terminate the contest. The furtress, just
pronounced by its commander to be impregnable,
is captured at a single bound by a nameless
individual on a skewbald mare, carrying on his
saddle-bow the youthful prince, Ajib!

Shrieks—shouts—clash of arms. The
Jurgians, breaking up into parties, madly skirmish
among themselves! Timour leaps from the
giddy height across the moat, and flings
himself, armed with several swords, upon the nearest
foes. Six Jurgian warriors, and an old gentleman
in a wide-awake and a spangled apron, to
whom we have not been previously introduced,
attack him at once. Four go down before his
mighty arm, two more are wounded and give
back, when, shame to chivalry! the old gentleman,
who has been dodging in the rear, comes
behind the victor, deals a felon stroke, and lo!
the gallant, generous, too-confiding prince, is a
corpse!

Peace to the brave! We have redeemed his
memory, and lay this brief but truthful narrative,
like a garland, on his tomb.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.

THE story of the life of a great English
painter, Joshua Reynolds, first President of
the Royal Academy, drawn in outline by another
painter and academician, the late C. R. Leslie,
has been completed and coloured, since Leslie's
death, by a skilful man of letters, Mr. Tom
Taylor, the biographer of Haydon, who is,
perhaps, of all his literary brethren, the one who
knows most about, and is best qualified for
appreciation of, the painter's art. No startling
incidents or strange turns of the wheel of
fortune vary Reynolds's career of well-deserved
success. If we take away the exact account of
the results of each year's industry, and the
stories of the lives and fortunes of the persons
who marched in that bright procession through
his painting-room, which brought all who were
famous in England for rank, valour, genius, and
beauty to occupy in turn the mahogany chair
sacred to his sitters, there to be wheeled into good
lights on its easy casters, and sit tête-à-tête with
him by the hour together on successive days;
if we take away also the fact that Reynolds was
a most clubbable man, who had no enemies, and
spent all his evenings in cultivating the most
varied acquaintanceships and friendships, and
was at home to everybody who was anybody,
from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Kitty
Fisher, we may seem to take away a large part
of the man. Yet not so large a part as was to be
supposed before these two stout volumes, full as
they are of such details, brought us nearer than
we had ever yet come to the true mind of
Reynolds himself.

The fashionable portrait-painter, who did
not wear his dislikes on his sleeve, and, making
convenient use of his deafness at all awkward
turns of conversation, received with the same
courtesy persons of the most opposite character
and opinion, had a practical mind of his own,
well marked in all its characters. He had
that in him which drew him near to
Goldsmith, caused him to pay full honour to his
genius, and show a fellow-feeling that secured
the tender-hearted poet's love. It was allied to
something else in him that caused Johnson to
haunt his house, and drew Reynolds himself to
quiet dinners with John VVilkes, when that
impersonation of resistance to excess of authority
claimed by the Crown over the subject was
an outlaw who came secretly to town. Eor,
whatever John Wilkes's faults, he did represent
successful stand on behalf of the subject against
tyrannous over-stretching of the Crown's perogative.
"Wilkes and Liberty" was not a mere
unmeaning cry. So Reynolds seems to have
felt, and Wilkes had for him the attractions
of a man not only with strong political feeling
of the sort he himself quietly cherished, but
also he was in manners anything but what
might commonly pass for the type of a rough
demagogue. He was of elegant address, a
very pleasing man, who had fine taste, and
could appreciate the artist side of his friend
Reynolds.

In his later life, Wilkes produced for his
friends a splendid edition of Theophrastus and
Catullus, and made much way in a translation
of Anacreon. Reynolds, in fact, was, with all
his good-humoured quietness, so manifestly on
the people's side, that he could not obtain the
favour of the king. In the height of his power
he was strong enough to make the king sit to
him; but his majesty sat under unmistakable
compulsion, and, in the great political world,
the painter's chief friends were at last among