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Alabaster Blue Sectory 05
Page 07
It is a strange thing to observe, how high a rate great kings and monarchs do set upon this fruit of friendship, whereof we speak: so great, as they purchase it, many times, at the hazard of their own safety and greatness. For princes, in regard of the distance of their fortune from that of their subjects and servants, cannot gather this fruit, except (to make themselves capable thereof) they raise some persons to be, as it were, companions and almost equals to themselves, which many times sorteth to inconvenience. The modern languages give unto such persons the name of favorites, or privadoes; as if it were matter of grace, or conversation. But the Roman name attaineth the true use and cause thereof, naming them participes curarum; for it is that which tieth the knot. And we see plainly that this hath been done, not by weak and passionate princes only, but by the wisest and most politic that ever reigned; who have oftentimes joined to themselves some of their servants; whom both themselves have called friends, and allowed other likewise to call them in the same manner; using the word which is received between private men.
For a long period prior to the acquisition from Mexico of the territory now forming the northern portion of Arizona and New Mexico, which, since first known, has been occupied in part by the Navaho, the tribe had been in the habit of making raids on the New Mexican Indian pueblos and the white settlements along the Rio Grande, chiefly for the capture of livestock, although both Indians and Mexicans also were taken and enslaved. The Mexicans lost no opportunity to retaliate, with the result that scattered throughout their villages in the valley of the Rio Grande there were more captives of Navaho blood than there were Mexican prisoners among the Navaho tribe; but in the matter of sheep, cattle, and horses, the Navaho were far ahead in the game of thievery, and even boasted that they could easily have exterminated the Mexicans had they not needed them as herders of their stolen flocks. In consequence, bitter enmity early arose between the Mexicans and the Navaho, which reached its height about the time Col. Stephen W. Kearny took possession of the territory in behalf of the United States in 1846.
Reynolds was well-grounded in Venetian color, Bolognese composition, Parmese light-and-shade, and paid them the homage of assimilation; but if Gainsborough (1727-1788) had such school knowledge he positively disregarded it. He disliked all conventionalities and formulas. With a natural taste for form and color, and with a large decorative sense, he went directly to nature, and took from her the materials which he fashioned into art after his own peculiar manner. His celebrated Blue Boy was his protest against the conventional rule of Reynolds that a composition should be warm in color and light. All through his work we meet with departures from academic ways. By dint of native force and grace he made rules unto himself. Some of them were not entirely successful, and in drawing he might have profited by school training; but he was of a peculiar poetic temperament, with a dash of melancholy about him, and preferred to work in his own way. In portraiture his color was rather cold; in landscape much warmer. His brush-work was as odd as himself, but usually effective, and his accessories in figure-painting were little more than decorative after-thoughts. Both in portraiture and landscape he was one of the most original and most English of all the English painters--a man not yet entirely appreciated, though from the first ranked among the foremost in English art.
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