GEORGE, a famous painter, was a lineal descendant of Sir Samuel Morland, and was born in the Haymarket, London, on the 26th June 1763. Before the age of six he had taken to the pencil as if by instinct, and was producing drawings which were sold without any difficulty. His father, an ignorant man and an indifferent artist, undertook the entire superintendence of his training. He denied him every recreation, shut him up in a garret, forced him to produce sketches for sale, and incited him to progress in his studies by pampering his boyish appetites and vanities. Under such discipline the young artist simultaneously improved in painting and degenerated in morality; so that by the time he was sixteen he was alike precocious in talent and in vice. In his seventeenth year he threw off the paternal thraldom, and rushed with eagerness into gaiety and dissipation. His facile and masterly pencil was incessantly plied to defray the expenses of the most thoughtless prodigality. Even in the very heat and excitement of conviviality, he dashed off sketches of rural economy, notable for their elegance and quiet truthfulness. His representations of pigs and asses were especially unrivalled. He might now have realized a handsome competence, and have risen into the esteem of the learned and the great. But his affections were perversely fixed, and his money was freely lavished upon such companions as prize-fighters, hostlers, and pet-boys. Even a virtuous and attractive wife, and the pleasures of a comfortable home, failed to charm him away from his haunts of gross gratification and uproarious merriment. During all this time, when his painting was supplying money for his pleasures, his pleasures were supplying subjects for his painting. He was depicting tap-rooms and hedge-alehouses with that delicate tact of genius which, in handling an object, selects all those properties that are essential and picturesque, and rejects all those that are accidental and coarse. Such pictures as these raised his fame without increasing his fortune. He was continually infested by swarms of accomplished swindlers, who decoyed him on in his giddy round of dissipation, supplied him with money to pay for his prodigality, and exacted in return sketches far exceeding in value the sums that had been advanced. In course of time Morland became a squalid debtor, skulking in obscure alleys, and straining all his cunning to escape from tipsstaffs. He was arrested; but by the intercession of his friends he obtained the Rules of the Bench. There his light-headed dissipation was indulged, and his felicitous sketches were produced as incessantly as ever, until he was set free by the Insolvent Debtor's Act. By this time his constitution was irrecoverably shattered. In his thirty-ninth year he was struck with a palsy; an arrestment for debt followed, and he was lodged in a spunging-house in Eyre Street. He died there in 1804. (See Cunningham's Lives of British Painters, &c.)

Sir Samuel, a skilful mechanist, was the son of a clergyman, and was born at Sulhamstead-Bannister in Berkshire about 1625. He was educated at Winchester school and at the university of Cambridge. Several years afterwards he became assistant to Thurloe, the secretary of Cromwell. His exertions in behalf of the fund for the persecuted Piedmontese first brought him before the notice of the public. He acted as commissioner extraordinary for the distribution of the collected money; and published in 1658 the History of the Evangelical Churches of Piedmont. In 1659 he is said to have discovered and betrayed a plot formed by Cromwell, Thurloe, and Sir Charles Willis, for alluring Prince Charles over to England, and overthrowing the royalist cause by one blow. His services in behalf of the King were rewarded after the Restoration by several honours and dignities. He was created a knight and a baronet, was appointed master of mechanics to his Majesty, and a gentleman of the royal privy chamber, and received a pension of L400. About this time he seems to have become thoroughly engrossed with his mechanical studies. His invention of the speaking-trumpet was divulged to the world in 1671, in a treatise entitled A Description of the Tuba Stentorophonica. Two years afterwards he published an account of an arithmetical machine which he had invented in 1666. He also improved the fire-engine, capstan, and especially the pump and the water-engine. The cost of these inventions and improvements ruined his fortune, previously diminished by misfortune and imprudence. Blindness was added to his calamities; and he spent the last three years of his life subsisting almost entirely on the benevolence of Archbishop Tenison, and giving vent to his