[148] In 1781, Mary Robinson (1758-1800), known as “Perdita,” had ceased to be the mistress of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV., whose bond for £20,000, never paid, was exchanged for the pension of £500 a year awarded her by Fox in 1783. She was portrayed by Reynolds twice, and by Romney, Gainsborough, Hoppner, Zoffany, and twice by Cosway. The original name of Mrs. Robinson’s family had been M’Dermott, which had been changed by an ancestor to Darby. Mrs. Darby had brought up her daughter under difficult circumstances. Obliged to earn her own living during her husband’s absence in America, she started a ladies’ boarding school in Little Chelsea, in which the future “Perdita” (as we learn from her autobiography) taught English literature to the daughters of the well-to-do citizens, and read to them “sacred and moral lessons on saints’ days and Sunday evenings.” The “high personage” referred to in this paragraph is of course the Prince, in whom Richard Cosway, the courtly miniaturist, found a lavish patron. [149] Anticipating, on a higher scale, Dickens’s servant-girl bride, who, on stepping into a hackney-coach after the ceremony, “threw a red shawl, which she had, no doubt, brought on purpose, negligently over the number on the door, evidently to delude pedestrians into the belief that the hackney-coach was a private carriage” (_Sketches by Boz_). [150] Smith’s first master, John Keyse Sherwin, had been a pupil of Bartolozzi. In his studio in St. James’s Street, he was patronised by the Duchesses of Devonshire and Rutland, Lady Jersey, and other ladies of rank, many of whom were eager to figure in his drawing of “The Finding of Moses,” in which the Princess Royal appeared as Pharaoh’s daughter. He was a wonderfully skilful portrait artist: “I have often seen him,” says Smith, “begin at the toe, draw upwards, and complete it at the top of the head in a most correct and masterly manner. He had also an extraordinary command over the use of both his hands.” He was an irregular worker, however, and debt and dissipation helped to kill him at the age of 39. The sitting given to Sherwin by Mrs. Siddons took place soon after her re-appearance at Drury Lane Theatre, the beginning of her real fame, October 10, 1782. After opening with Isabella in Garrick’s version of _The Fatal Marriage_, she played Euphrasia in _The Grecian Daughter_. [151] William Henderson, a collector, lived at No. 33 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, where he was the neighbour of Constable.