Sir,—I have for some time expected to receive from my friend Mr. Stonehewer the valuable miniature which Sir Joshua Reynolds bequeathed me, and which he received from Miss Palmer; but as he has lately written to tell me that he waits for a safer conveyance than he has yet met with, I will not defer answering your most obliging letter any longer, and returning my thanks for your having settled matters with Mr. Cadell respecting Du Fresnoy in a manner more than satisfactory to me.
I have to thank you also for the trouble you have taken in sending me so much information relative to the controversy concerning Milton’s portrait, and for giving me your own opinion also concerning the writing affixed to it, which with you, I think to have been written much later than Sir Joshua imagined.
My supposition is, that Deborah Milton might have been, before her father’s death, in possession of the picture in question. Cooper might himself have painted it at her request, after her father was blind, and it might have been her property before she was on bad terms with him. There is great probability also for thinking that either her indigent circumstances or of those she left behind her, might have induced them to sell it to some unknown person at a low price, and that it might have got into a third hand, who wrote on hearsay the memorandum which certainly contains blunders, if not falsehoods. I have, however, no doubt but that Cooper painted it and that Milton sat for it.
Sir Joshua says, in his letter to Urban, that the “drop serene is not visible in the miniature,” but for myself, I have long been of a different opinion, and when I was last in residence in York, I sent a young, blind musician to my friend Dr. Burney, with a recommendatory letter, and requested (at a time when I was ignorant of poor Sir Joshua’s danger) that he would contrive he might be a living argument on my aide of the question. And I am persuaded that were you to see the unfortunate youth, you would perceive a similar cast of eye in his countenance. It is this very cast and indirect glance which gave the portrait that shrewd cunning look