As a portrait painter Romney will be more prized and remembered, although it is not likely that any existing connoisseurs will be found to proclaim themselves with Lord Thurlow, of 'the Romney faction,' as opposed to the school of Reynolds. In contrasting the works of the rival painters, it is easy to see that however close a race for fame they seemed to be running in their own time, there exists in truth a wide distance between the president of the Academy and 'the man in Cavendish Square.' It is not only that Romney had not the variety of Reynolds; that he could not give to portrait painting the new life with which Reynolds had so happily invested it:--he did not hit character nearly so well; he could not endow his sitters with the air of repose, ease, and elegance peculiar to the Reynolds portraits; he failed to give interest to his backgrounds, generally too near and flat, and heavily painted; and he had not Sir Joshua's success in subduing the eccentricities of costume of the day, and bestowing a certain grace and beauty upon even the most exuberant capes, cuffs, ruffles, wigs, cravats, and frills, prevalent a century ago. There is an air of _fashion_ about many of Romney's portraits as opposed to the look of _nobility_, which is the especial attribute of Reynolds's pictures. In contemplating a Sir Joshua there will be found a propriety, an integrity about the work which effectually prevents all thought of the parts played by the tailor or the milliner at the toilet of the sitter. This is not always the case with Romney's portraits; pattern, and cut, and vogue do not fail to assert themselves. In colour Romney is very unequal; in his own day it was notoriously inferior to Reynolds's, though in spite of some instances of chalkiness and thinness, generally rich, pure, and lustrous. But the President's recourse to meretricious methods of obtaining beauty of tint has ruined the majority of his works, rendering their glories fleeting as photographs. Romney prudently adhered to a safer manner. Many of his pictures can even now be hardly less fresh and glowing in colour than when they first left his easel. His carnations and flesh tints are often singularly fine. His small portraits possess dignity, with force and manliness, however, rather than absolute ease or refinement. But his chief success was in his female heads. In quick and distinct appreciation of beauty he was not behind Reynolds; while, occasionally, he attained a certain poetic height of expression it would be difficult to parallel among Sir Joshua's works.