sunshine, or the first sight in spring-time of a bank of primroses.

He had no recreations except his violin: his life was entirely devoted to his art. At Eartham, during his summer holiday, he worked incessantly. There, in "a riding-house of wood" converted into a studio, which "afforded him a walk of a hundred feet under cover," he "meditated" on the various pictures from Shakespeare that he meant to produce. In London, at the height of his prosperity, he worked till bedtime, occasionally when the days grew longer drinking tea at Kilburn Wells, or dining at the Long Room, Hampstead. Married early, he left his wife, as all the world knows, to seek fame in London at the age of twenty-eight, found it, enjoyed it, lost his health, became hypochondriac, and returned to his wife, at the age of sixty-five, a broken and shattered man. His biographers have censured or excused his marital conduct. Mary seems to have made no complaint. She knew George and understood him, knew that he had ceased to care for her, and that his art held, and would always hold, chief place in his affections. I am not tempted to play the part of moralist. Romney's niche in the Temple of Fame is as painter, not as husband. Tennyson treated the domestic side in his poem "Romney's Remorse." The painter, according to the bard—

                "... made
The wife of wives a widow bride, and lost
Salvation for a sketch."

Edward Fitzgerald, a bachelor, observes in one of his letters: "When old, nearly mad, and quite desolate, he went back to her, and she received him and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney's pictures; even as a matter of Art, I am sure."

Romney supported his wife, no great tax on a man who made nearly £4000 in one year, and he paid her two or three visits in the course of his triumphant career. The ugly part of the story is that he posed in London as a bachelor.

PLATE IV.—THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER: A Portrait.

(From the picture in the National Gallery)

This dainty portrait was called "The Parson's Daughter" by a former owner. Romney must have enjoyed the brief task of painting her. She gave him no trouble, you may be sure. Easily as a thrush sings he suggested the powdered hair framing the coquettish face masked in demureness, the long neck springing from the slight frame, and the note of green in the auburn curls.

PLATE IV.—THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER: A Portrait.

Shy, something of a recluse, impressionable, with delicate perceptions that made him a favourite among women, he was a man of good physical strength and robust appearance. According to Cumberland, he talked well. His harangues on art were "uttered in a hurried accent, an elevated tone, and very commonly accompanied by tears, to which he was by constitution prone." We are also informed that a noble sentiment never failed to make his eyes to overflow and his voice to tremble.

The early biographies of Romney were written to counteract one another. Hayley's foolish volume of 1809 was composed to correct the "coarse representation" of Cumberland, which was published in the European Magazine. Cumberland was a sensible man, and he wrote well. The useful but too appreciative volume by his son, John Romney, was a counterblast to Hayley. Later lives have been George Paston's admirable study, and the indispensable Catalogue Raisonné by Mr. W. Roberts, with a biographical and critical essay by Mr. Humphry Ward, which also includes the text of Romney's Diaries from 1776 to 1795, acquired at Miss Romney's sale in 1894.

Romney lived in an age when men and women of sensibility wrote poems of praise to one another. Cowper's is perhaps the best known.

"But this I mark, that symptoms none of woe
In thy incomparable work appear."

It is poor stuff; but better than the effusions of Hayley, Miss Seward, and John Halliday.

CHAPTER III

VICISSITUDES OF FAME

To-day—one hundred and five years after his death—no millionaire's gallery is complete without a Romney, and the desire to possess a fine example grows fiercer yearly.

Doubtless, the purchasers at public auction in 1896 of the "Ladies Caroline and Elizabeth Spencer," in white and red dresses, for £10,500, and, in 1902, of Miss Sarah Rodbard fondling a Skye terrier curled up upon a stone pedestal, for the same price, were well content with their bargains. Romney received £84 apiece for these pictures. His "Lady Hamilton as Nature," which was bought by Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, Turner's friend, for 50 guineas in 1816 was resold after the Grafton Exhibition for, it is said, 20,000 guineas. The picture is now in Paris.

The witchery of his portraits of dainty dolls, the sweet composure of his young matrons, the charm of his children, the delicacy of his presentments of men, such as the "Wesley" and the "Warren Hastings," captivate the unlearned as well as connoisseurs. The appeal of his gift for expressing momentary loveliness is instantaneous. He was a poet in paint to a far greater degree than the so-called poets of the Eartham set were in words. No problem is offered; the freshness of the flower-like faces is stated simply and without hint of cleverness. The reticent colour lingers on sash or ribbon, and beneath the powdered fair hair the rose and cream tints of these pretty mondaines bloom like the petals of carnations against the light. So virginal are the typical Romney ladies, that it is almost a shock to read that some of the portraits were never paid for, because the bright creatures had been passed on from the protector who gave the commission for the portrait. John Romney found a neat phrase when he said that his father "could impart to his female figures that indescribable something—that je ne sais quoi—which captivates the spectator without his being able to account for it."

PLATE V.—LADY WITH A CHILD.

(From the picture in the National Gallery)

The dark blue eyes of the child gaze out upon the world in reposeful wonder. The pose is delightfully natural. Romney's genius for design never failed him when his subject was a girl, a mother and child, or a group of children at play.

PLATE V.—LADY WITH A CHILD.

Strange it is that until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Romney revival began, fostered by the "Old Masters' Exhibitions" and auction sales, his fame had suffered an almost total eclipse. His portraits were hidden in private collections, the National Gallery set had not been acquired, and nobody cared about his heroic and historical cartoons and studies, at Cambridge and elsewhere.

The eclipse of the fame of Romney is no doubt partly due to the fact that he never exhibited at the Royal Academy, which in those days meant that "outsiders," so far as the public was concerned, were truly in outer darkness. When Romney retired from contact with the fashionable world, with which he never associated himself except as a painter; when he forsook his disastrous building experiments at Hampstead, for the living death (of his later years) at Kendal, he passed out of public life. His portraits ceased to