punctilious ceremonial courtesy, more punctilious and much loftier than anything ever observed in the House of Peers.

The “Bear” figures in the letters of Fanny Burney, who with her friend Mrs. Thrale was travelling to Bath in 1780. They took four days about that business, halting the first night at Maidenhead, the second at the “Castle,” Speen Hill, and the third here. In the evening they played cards, the lively Miss Burney declaring to her correspondent that the doing so made her feel “old-cattish”: whist having ever been the resort of dowagers. Engaged upon this engrossing occupation, the strains of music gradually dawned upon their attention, coming from an adjoining room. Did they, as many would have done, thump upon the intervening wall, by way of signifying their disapproval? Not at all. The player was rendering the overture to the Buono Figliuola—whatever that may have been—and playing it well. Mrs. Thrale went and tapped at the door whence these sweet sounds came, in order to compliment the unknown musician; whereupon a handsome girl whose dark hair clustered finely upon a noble forehead, opened the door, and another invited Mrs. Thrale and Miss Burney to chairs. These pretty creatures were the daughters of the innkeeper. They were well enough, to be sure, but the wonder of the family was away from home. “This was their brother, a most lovely boy of ten years of age, who seems to be not merely the wonder of their family, but of the times, for his astonishing skill at drawing. They protest he has never had any instruction, yet showed us some of his productions that were really beautiful.”

THE “BEAR,” DEVIZES.

This marvel was none other than Thomas Lawrence, the future painter of innumerable portraits of the wealthy and the noble, who rose to be P.R.A. and to knighthood at the hands of George the Fourth. His father, at this time landlord of the “Bear,” seems to have been a singularly close parallel to Mr. Micawber in fiction, and to Mr. John Dickens in real life. The son of a Presbyterian minister, and articled to a solicitor, he turned aside from writs and affidavits and practical things of that kind, to the making of verses; and the verse-making, by a sort of natural declension, presently led him to fall in love, and to run away with the pretty daughter of the vicar of Tenbury, in Worcestershire. He tried life as an actor, and that failed; as a surveyor of excise, with little better result; and then became landlord of the “White Lion” at Bristol, the house in which his son Thomas, the future P.R.A., was born, in 1769. In 1772 he removed to Devizes, and took the “Bear”: not an inconsiderable speculation, as the description of the house, already given, would lead one to suspect. Some unduly confiding person must have lent the shiftless, but engaging and gentlemanly, fellow the capital, and it is to be feared he lost by it, for although in the pages of Columella, a curious work of fiction published at that time, Lawrence is styled “the only man upon the road for warm rooms, soft beds, and—Oh, prodigious!—for reading Milton,” his innkeeping was a failure.

Notwithstanding those “warm rooms and soft beds,” which rather remind you of Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s lines in The Mountebanks—