small sums as she could spare, sending him half a guinea at a time, hidden under the seal of a letter; in return he forwarded to her his own portrait, his first work in oil. After staying nearly a year in York, Steele and his apprentice moved to Lancaster. Meeting with little encouragement there, Steele, always restless and embarrassed, determined to try his fortune in Ireland. The pupil was now very anxious to be quit of his preceptor; he longed to be practising on his own account. He had at different times lent Steele small sums of money, amounting altogether to ten pounds. He now proposed that both debt and articles of apprenticeship should be cancelled--that the release of the debtor should be the consideration for the freedom of the apprentice. Steele consented, and George Romney became his own master. His prices until he went to London were certainly not high: two guineas for a three-quarter portrait and six for a whole figure on a kit-cat canvas. The only way of making this poor tariff remunerative was by extreme rapidity of execution; and few men have ever painted so rapidly as Romney. But this rapid manner has its disadvantages. If habitually persisted in, it in time renders thorough finish impossible to the painter. An absolute necessity in Romney's early life, it became a distinct vice in his after works. To this were in part attributable the crowd of incomplete canvases the painter left behind him at his death, and the characteristic sketchiness traceable even in his most esteemed pictures. At York he disposed of twenty pictures by a lottery, which produced little more than forty pounds. Among these works was a scene from _Tristram Shandy_, upon which he had bestowed some pains; for at York Romney had attracted the notice of Laurence Sterne (whose portrait Steele had painted), and received at his hands marks of attention and friendship.