And room was becoming very necessary; for Mrs. Cosway's receptions were now the town rage--were crowded to inconvenience. They were marked by what was then a speciality; though it has since become a common enough characteristic of such assemblies. 'Lions' were to be met with there--literary, artistic, and otherwise. The last new poets, painters, players, were to be seen with their honours in their newest gloss; the latest discoverers, navigators, and travellers--freshly escaped from shipwreck or cannibals--the rising stars of the House of Commons--anybody and everybody of the least note, with the provision, possibly, that they should be 'elegant and ingenious,'--these thronged the charming Mrs. Cosway's drawing-rooms. The elect of society, for the first time on the same floor and under the same roof, met and shook hands, deriving a curious piquant sort of pleasure from the proceeding, with--_Bohemia_; the word must be used, though not an agreeable one, much misused and liable to be misinterpreted, and above all, though in the Cosway period it was altogether unknown and unheard of. Especially were to be noted among the guests the Whig adherents of the Prince of Wales, the politicians of the buff and blue school: little Cosway, busy in the midst of them, attempting a statesman-like attitude, sympathizing with revolution, and affecting to discover in the convulsions of the French nation the dawn of an empire of reason and taste, in which genius and virtue alone would be honoured. Possibly the painter expressed too unreservedly his views in these respects. A prince may be permitted to masquerade as a _proletaire_; but for a bystander to talk red republicanism to a royal heir-apparent is rather doubtful taste, to say the least of it. By-and-by wild Prince Hal came to power, and shrunk from his old associates. The Regent abandoned his buff and blue friends, looked coldly upon his whilom political companions: withdrawing his favour from Cosway among the rest. The painter troubled himself little about the matter. He was too proud or too indifferent to make any effort to regain the royal patronage. If he had done little to merit its bestowal upon him in the first instance, certainly he had done nothing to deserve its withdrawal from him at last.