house he called a home, and the honours which had never blossomed for the living man were bestowed on the corpse, which lay in state at the Adelphi, surrounded by the work of his hands. He was buried in St. Paul's. "There he rests side by side with the great ones of his profession. Posterity had reversed the positions of West and his competitor, the first is last, and the last first; but it was hardly to be expected that the young would be anxious to follow Barry in a line of art in which neither ability nor perseverance seemed to succeed, or to start in a career for which not even princely patronage could obtain public sympathy, nor innate genius, with life-long devotion, win present fame, hardly indeed a bare subsistence." (_Redgrave._) Returning for a moment to _Portrait Painters_, we find two of that class who were contemporary with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and of whom the first nearly equalled the president in popularity. [Illustration: MARQUIS OF STAFFORD. _By_ ROMNEY. _In the possession of the Duke of Sutherland._] GEORGE ROMNEY (1734--1802) was born near Dalton-in-Furness, North Lancashire, and for some years followed his father's craft of cabinet-making. The story of his life is one of marked success and singular selfishness. He first studied art with Edward Steele, of Kendal, a portrait painter of some skill and reputation, who had painted Sterne. Whilst assisting his master to elope with his future wife, Romney fell ill, and was nursed by young Mary Abbot. He rewarded the devotion of his nurse by marrying her, and when she was the mother of two children, by leaving her at home poor and alone, whilst he was rich and famous in London. During a long and successful career Romney only visited his family twice, to find on the second occasion his daughter dead, and his son grown up and in Holy Orders. The painter's strange, selfish life ended in imbecility, and the patient wife who had nursed the youth of twenty-three, soothed the last hours of the man of seventy, whose fame she had never shared. Romney was as eccentric in life as in his genius. Shunning the society of his fellow artists, he complained of their neglect, and refused to enter the Royal Academy. It was said of Sterne that "he would shed tears over a dead donkey whilst he left a living mother to starve." In like manner Romney wrote gushing words of sympathy for the widow of another man, whilst his own wife had been practically widowed for more than thirty years. Of the intercourse of Romney with the fair and frail Emma Lyon, who, as Lady Hamilton, exercised an influence for evil over him and over Nelson, it is not our province to speak. The fitful temper of the painter led him to begin numerous pictures he never finished, cart-loads of which were removed from his house at Hampstead. Romney's want of steadfastness often compelled him to abandon works of which the conception was greater than the power to carry it out. There was a want of _thoroughness_ about him,