do not seriously believe, it shows that the most important of the members of this family retained full powers of hand and eye until he was close upon his seventieth year. He died on 6 Sept. 1802, at the house where Blake had found him thirty years before, and he was buried in a vault under Pentonville Chapel. He was twice married—to Anne Beaupuy and Isabella Turner, by the second of whom he was the father of James. A portrait of him by his son is prefixed to the eighth volume of Nichols's ‘Literary Anecdotes.’
The other members of his family who worked in the same profession may now be briefly mentioned. His father, Isaac, was born in 1704 and died in 1768. He has been styled a map engraver. He engraved the frontispiece to an edition of Bailey's dictionary (1755). Of the son—the first James—we have already spoken. James Basire the second, a Londoner like his forerunner, was born on 12 Nov. 1769, and died at Chigwell Wells on 13 May 1822. The appointment which his father received from the Society of Antiquaries was extended and continued to him, and there is enough to show that he was a good draughtsman, a capable and accomplished engraver. Inspired doubtless by his father, he seems to have worked upon the old lines, and when he is at his best the differences between his method and that of the most eminent member of his house are generally imperceptible. Much of his most careful work was published by the Society of Antiquaries in 1808; for instance, the series of plates engraved after an original drawing on a roll of vellum, representing ‘the death, funeral, etc. of John Islip, Abbot of Westminster, who died anno Domini 1532.’ With regard to more than one of the Oxford engravings the question may arise whether they are not by his hand. The ‘Worcester College,’ for instance, is stated to have been drawn by ‘W. Turner, R.A.,’ the ‘Inside View of the Hall of Christ Church’ by ‘J. M. W. Turner, R.A.;’ yet it was only after the death of the elder and greater Basire in 1802 that Turner could have rightly employed the initials of a full academician, though he had been an associate since 1799. Who then was the engraver of these things? The last Basire whose name has appeared in any dictionary was James, the fourth ‘Basire’ and the third ‘James.’ He was born in 1796, and died in London on 17 May 1869. He did some good work: amongst other pieces some pretty, yet in character rather petty, plates of Sussex country-houses, including Glynde Place and Glyndebourne House. Like his forefathers, he was a busy man, but much of his life fell upon a time when antiquarian record and research were less generously encouraged than in the older days, and he seems to have been personally disposed to wield a less severe burin than that whose employment had made the fame and secured the competence of the earlier members of his house. In his time the engraver's art had already experienced the temptation to be popular, while the popular taste was wholly uninstructed and childish. The eldest of the three Jameses—the first of the name—had worked steadily on through what was really nearly all the great period of English engraving. Hogarth was still living while he was but a young man; Robert Strange was but a few years his senior; Woollett, the most fashionable artist in line, and Earlom, an acknowledged master in mezzotint, were but a few years his juniors. Nor, of course, had the youngest of the three Jameses—the one with whom, as far as artistic matters are concerned, the family dies out—either the good or evil fortune to be without contemporaries of conspicuous talent. He must have known both the impulse and the depression that may come from rivalry. In the very middle of his uneventful and unillustrious career, the best of the line engravers after Turner—the engravers of his landscape—were doing, for the applause of a later generation, their most exquisite work. They were a goodly company, but the youngest of the Basires was not invited to join them. The particular order of skill of which they had given evidence was not, it is true, that for which the name of Basire had ever been celebrated, but—more than this—the accomplishments and sterling artistic virtues of the Basire family were represented but feebly in the person of its youngest member.
[Redgrave's Dictionary of Artists of the English School; Gilchrist's Life of Blake; Nichols's Lit. Anecd. iii. 717–18.]
BASKERVILLE, HANNIBAL (1597–1668), antiquary, the son of Sir Thomas Baskerville [q. v.], knight, commander of the English army in France, by Mary, daughter of Sir Thomas Throgmorton, was born at Saint-Valéry, in Picardy, on 5 April 1597. He himself states: ‘I was christened by one Mr. Man, the preacher, and I had all the captains, about thirty-two, to be my godfathers, it being the custome so of the wars, when the generall hath a son (they say); but two only stood at the font or great bason: one was Sir Arthur Savage, the other I cannot remember his name.’ His father died when he was only nine weeks old. He was instructed under the care of Henry Peacham,
