ABSTRACT
THE readers of this miscellany may, perhaps, have remarked that always, at the May season and the period of the exhibitions, our eccentric correspondent Titmarsh seems to be seized with a double fit of eccentricity, and to break out into such violent fantastical gambols as might cause us to be alarmed did we not know him to be harmless, and induce us to doubt of his reason but that the fit is generally brief, and passes off after the first excitement occasioned by visiting the picture galleries. It was in one of these fits, some years since, that he announced in this Magazine his own suicide, which we know to be absurd, for he has drawn many hundred guineas from us since:—on the same occasion he described his debts and sojourn at a respectable hotel, in which it seems he has never set his foot. But these hallucinations pass away with May, and next month he will, no doubt, be calmer, or, at least, not more absurd than usual. Some disappointments occurring to himself, and the refusal of his great picture of “Heliogabalus” in the year 1803 (which caused his retirement from practice as a painter), may account for his extreme bitterness against some of the chief artists in this or any other school or country. Thus we have him in these pages abusing Raphael; in the very last month he fell foul of Rubens, and in the present paper he actually pooh-poohs Sir Martin Shee and some of the Royal Academy. This is too much. “Cælum ipsum,” as Horace says, “petimus stultitià.” But we will quote no more the well-known words of the Epicurean bard.
