Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816

69. On the vulgarity of Northcote's Memoirs of Reynolds (London, 1813), see Farington, vol. 12, 4414 (Aug. 20, 1813). West had read only extracts from the book in the Morning Chronicle, Aug. 24, 1813, but said he "did not wish to see any more of it"; Farington, vol. 12, 4416 (Aug. 30, 1813). Review of Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, by James Northcote, Critical Review, 4th ser., 4 (Oct. 1813); 354, 369 ("irksomeness and insipidity" of the reader's task, 369); and British Critic, 2nd ser., 1 (Feb. 1814): 150.

70. British Critic, 2nd ser., 1 (Feb. 1814): 149-50, 157. Another critic of Northcote's book (in a long essay more tribute to Reynolds than review) thought the opportunity to represent an exemplary life--from which readers might learn--frittered away by an author more interested in the "circumstantial narratives of occurrences which happen to every man in society"; Edinburgh Review 45 (Sept. 1814): 262-92, at 263, 269. Benjamin Robert Haydon identified the writer as R. P. Knight; Farington, vol. 13, 4596 (Oct. 20, 1814). See also Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. R. W. Lightbown, 2 vols. (2nd ed., rev., 1819; reprint, London: Cornmarket Press, 1971).

71. West to J. S. Copley (who was not much better at spelling), June 20, 1767, in The Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776, ed. Guernsey Jones (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914), 56.

72. "Fresnoy," Middlesex Journal, July 29, 1769; the writer made clear that he did not see West as qualified for the title of gentleman on any account.

73. Elizabeth West, in Farington, vol. 6, 2480 (Dec. 26, 1804); and Leigh Hunt, "Benjamin West," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 1 (July 1850): 194.

74. Hunt (as in n. 73); Beaumont's opinion is noted in Farington, vol. 8, 3156 (Dec. 4, 1807). For other reports of West's mispronunciations, see Farington, vol. 8, 3160 (Dec. 10, 1807), vol. 12, 4364 (June 5, 1813), vol. 13, 4492 (Apr. 18, 1814). Haydon, who had little respect for West, represented him as barely coherent in a devastating parody, "Dreams of a Somniator," quoted in James Elmes, Annals of the Fine Arts 3 (1819): 7.

75. Galt also knew that, as Nick Whistler suggested. "understatement appears to denote modesty, so in his own autobiography he chose a plain clear style and adopted an anti-heroic stance to give the impression that his protagonist was a modest but true hero"; Whistler, "Galt's Life and the Autobiography," in Waterston (as in n. 62), 48. The writer may have applied the same principle to the nearly autobiographical Life of West. Galt's sensitivity to language is nowhere more evident than in his Scottish novels, in which even individual characters engage in complex "dialect-switching" according to particular social and psychological situations; see J. Derrick McClure, "Scots and English in Annals of the Parish and The Provost," in Whatley (as in n. 62). 195-210.