From many of his canvases we can see man’s splendid gifts struggling for full expression. At times he seems to be a reflection of a still greater man, Sir Joshua Reynolds; at other times he is the founder of a tradition that lesser men were to make vulgar and commonplace and bring ultimately into disrepute. But at every period of his life and in every aspect of his work with which we are acquainted, Thomas Lawrence is interesting--perhaps it is permissible to say he is even lovable. One gets the impression of a strong man who has equipped himself for life’s race in despite of disadvantages that would have crushed and quelled the spirit of a weakling, a man who makes for the most difficult goal, and reaches it in triumph. He is an Englishman every inch of him, and the spirit that supported him is one he shared with the greatest of this island’s citizens. Even the most severe of his critics cannot hide their admiration of the man, though they are most acutely conscious of the shortcomings of the artist. It is fair to remember, too, that much of the painter’s work was done under certain disadvantages inherent in the times of his activity. With the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, costume was stiff and ugly to an extreme that excites our laughter now. The age of artificiality was upon land, and Sir Thomas Lawrence was not so well equipped for making the best of it as were Reynolds and Gainsborough, who came immediately before him. That he succeeded so often in making the personality of a sitter overcome the absurdities of dress and decoration is an eloquent tribute to his art. His treatment of children is frankly delightful but frankly derivative; it is only necessary to refer to such portraits as the “Childhood’s Innocence,” “Master Lambton,” “Nature,” and the “Countess Gower and Daughter,” to see how great is his debt to one who was _facile princeps_ among the painters of childhood--Sir Joshua himself--and how far he fell short of his teacher’s greatness. But the gallery of children is a small one; the collection of representative men and women of his time is far larger, more representative, and painting many of these portraits the artist is speaking with his own voice, the voice that lured so many men of a later generation to assume it as their own, with results that are little short of lamentable. Students of the life of Sir Thomas Lawrence must surely have shared the writer’s regret that the strong soul, the sure hand, and the far-seeing eye were not destined to have lived and thrived in the golden age of the Italian Renaissance. Then such natural gifts were stimulated to the highest possible pitch of development by the splendour of a more flamboyant life, the glory of a less restricted power, the rare beauty of pageant and of costume unknown to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, in a land where beauty was the very keynote of existence. There, poverty was a