Note 831 — Chapter VII · (continued 2)

Barry, in his celebrated Letter to the Dilettanti Society, regrets that Burke should have been diverted from the study of the fine arts into the pursuit of politics, because he had one of those ‘minds of an admirable expansion and catholicity, so as to embrace the whole concerns of art, ancient as well as modern, domestic as well as foreign.’ Barry's Works, vol. ii. p. 538, 4to, 1809. In the Annual Register for 1798, p. 329, 2nd edit., it is stated that Sir Joshua Reynolds ‘deemed Burke the best judge of pictures that he ever knew.’ See further Works of Sir J. Reynolds, Lond. 1846, vol. i. p. 185; and Bisset's Life of Burke, vol. ii. p. 257. A somewhat curious conversation between Burke and Reynolds, on a point of art, is preserved in Holcroft's Memoirs, vol. ii. pp. 276, 277.