In 1792 great honours were achieved. The King appointed Lawrence to be his painter in ordinary, in succession to the late Sir Joshua Reynolds, passing over Romney, Hoppner, Opie, and others, whose claims to the honour were held to be greater. Nothing succeeds like success, and the Dilettanti Society, suspending their regulation that said nobody who had not crossed the Alps could join their brotherhood, elected Lawrence and made him one of their chosen painters. He painted full-length portraits of the King and Queen, to be sent as a present to the Emperor of China, moved from Duke Street to Bond Street, and raised his prices all round, charging one hundred guineas for full-length portraits, fifty for half-lengths, and twenty-five for heads. In 1794 he received the full honours of the Academy; a year later the poet Cowper sat to him, and was so pleased with the portrait that he invited the artist to Weston. [Illustration: PLATE V.--MISS MARIA SIDDONS (In the Wallace Collection) The portrait of the lady with whom the artist was in love, and to whom he paid his vows, is a tribute to one side of the painter’s art. He has contrived to put far more into it than the mere quality of attractiveness. The constitutional delicacy of the sitter, her refined and sensitive nature, are clearly expressed, and the colour harmony is attractive.] Soon after this Lawrence would seem to have had some grave doubt as to whether his gifts were completely expressed through the medium of portraiture. The dramatic sense was very strong in him--portrait-painting could not quite satisfy it. To be “master of the unlettered nameless faces” sufficed him no longer, and he started a series of big canvases that added more to his labours than his fame. Staying with his great friend Fuseli at a house in Pembrokeshire he saw the artist leaning over some rocks that stand above the Bay of Bristol. The pose gave him an idea for a big canvas known as “Satan,” that was painted in 1797, found its way to the Duke of Norfolk’s collection, and then to the Academy authorities. A year later he gave London its first view of “Coriolanus in the house of Aufidius,” and followed this with other classical studies--Hamlet, Cato, and others, for which John Kemble sat.