ather, on pain of severe chastisement, to study drawing for sixteen hours every day during both summer and winter. After receiving instructions in miniature and enamel painting, he was carried by his parent to Rome in 1741. On his arrival at Dresden in 1746 Mengs was appointed court painter to King Augustus. A second visit was paid to Rome in the subsequent year, for the purpose of renewing his studies and gaining a knowledge of anatomy. It was there in 1748 that his genius was first fully displayed in a picture of the "Holy Family." The model for the Virgin was a beautiful peasant girl, who in the same year became his wife, and induced him to embrace the Catholic religion. Returning to Dresden soon afterwards, he was appointed principal court-painter, and was presented by the king with a pension of 1000 dollars. A commission from the king to execute an altar-piece for the new chapel at Dresden rendered it necessary that he should return to Italy with his family in 1752. Simultaneously with the work just mentioned Mengs painted a copy of Raphael's "School of Athens" for Lord Percy, afterwards Duke of Northumberland. The outbreak of the Seven Years' War stopped the payment of his pension, and prevented his return to Saxony. This misfortune, however, was compensated by his appointment in 1754 to the professorship in the new academy of painting in the Capitol. Invited about this time to Naples, he executed the portraits of the Neapolitan royal family. On his return to Rome in 1757 he began his first attempt in fresco, the ceiling of the church of St Eusebio. His masterpiece, however, was the beautiful ceiling in the Villa Albani, representing "Apollo and the Nine Muses on Mount Parnassus." In 1761 Mengs, at the request of Charles III., of Spain, proceeded to Madrid, and was employed there for several years in executing an oil-painting of "The Passion," for the bed-chamber of the king, and some frescoes representing the "Birth of Aurora," the "Apotheosis of Hercules," and the "Apotheosis of Trajan." His declining health, however, rendered a change of climate necessary, and in 1769 he returned to Italy. After a sojourn of three years, occupied chiefly in the painting of the ceiling of the Camera de' Papiri at Rome, he repaired once more to Spain. But in 1775, when his constitution was almost prostrated under the uncongenial climate, he bade a final farewell to that country. On his arrival in Rome his sickness gradually left him, only to be brought back with overwhelming force by the death of his amiable wife in 1778. He died on the 29th June 1779. His friend, the Cavalier d'Azara, erected a monument to him, and obtained from the King of Spain pensions for his two sons and five daughters.

The character of his pictures is rather correct in design than vigorous, and his tone of colouring is deficient in brilliancy. His writings, edited in Italian by Azara in 1780, contain many excellent observations both on the practice and theory of his art. Among the various translations into the principal modern languages is one into English in 2 vols. 8vo, London, 1796.whose name has been Latinized into Mencius, the most eminent Chinese philosopher after Confucius, flourished during the first half of the fourth century B.C., and thus belonged to the same epoch with Socrates,