What was it that had made Tischbein--not once, but thrice--abandon Goethe? We have no right to suppose he had plotted to avenge himself for the poet’s refusal to collaborate with him on the theme of primaeval man. A likelier explanation is merely that Goethe, as I have suggested, irked him. Forty years elapsed before Goethe collected his letters from Italy and made a book of them; and in this book he included--how magnanimous old men are!--several letters written to him from Naples by his deserter. These are shallow but vivid documents--the effusions of one for whom the visible world suffices. I take it that Tischbein was an ‘historic’ painter because no ambitious painter in those days wasn’t. In Goethe the historic sense was as innate as the aesthetic; so was the ethical sense; so was the scientific sense; and the three of them, forever cropping up in his discourse, may well be understood to have been too much for the simple Tischbein. But, you ask, can mere boredom make a man act so cruelly as this man acted? Well, there may have been another cause, and a more interesting one. I have mentioned that Goethe and Tischbein visited our Ambassador in Naples. His Excellency was at that time a widower, but his establishment was already graced by his future wife, Miss Emma Harte, whose beauty is so well known to us all. ‘Tischbein,’ wrote Goethe a few days afterwards, ‘is engaged in painting her.’ Later in the year, Tischbein, soon after his return to Naples, sent to Goethe a sketch for a painting he had now done of Miss Harte as Iphigenia at the Sacrificial Altar. Perhaps he had wondered that she should sacrifice herself to Sir William Hamilton.... ‘I like Hamilton uncommonly’ is a phrase culled from one of his letters; and when a man is very hearty about the protector of a very beautiful woman one begins to be suspicious. I do not mean to suggest that Miss Harte--though it is true she had not yet met Nelson--was fascinated by Tischbein. But we have no reason to suppose that Tischbein was less susceptible than Romney. Altogether, it seems likely enough that the future Lady Hamilton’s fine eyes were Tischbein’s main reason for not going to Sicily, and afterwards for his sudden exodus from Rome. But why, in this case, did he leave Naples, why go back to Rome, when Goethe was in Sicily? I hope he went for the purpose of shaking off his infatuation for Miss Harte. I am loth to think he went merely to wind up his affairs in Rome. I will assume that only after a sharp conflict, in which he fought hard on the side of duty against love, did he relapse to Naples. But I won’t pretend to wish he had finished that portrait.