I knew both these gentlemen at Rome, when George wore a velvet doublet and a beard down to his chest, and used to talk about high art at the Café Greco. How it smelled of smoke, that velveteen doublet of his, with which his stringy red beard was likewise perfumed! It was in his studio that I had the honour to be introduced to his sister, the fair Miss Clara; she had a large casque with a red horse-hair plume (I thought it had been a wisp of her brother’s beard at first), and held a tin-headed spear in her hand, representing a Roman warrior in the great picture of Caractacus George was painting--a piece sixty-four feet by eighteen. The Roman warrior blushed to be discovered in that attitude: the tin-headed spear trembled in the whitest arm in the world. So she put it down, and taking off the helmet also, went and sat in a far corner of the studio, mending George’s stockings; whilst we smoked a couple of pipes, and talked about Raphael being a good deal overrated. I think he is; and have never disguised my opinion about the “Transfiguration.” And all the time we talked, there were Clara’s eyes looking lucidly out from the dark corner in which she was sitting, working away at the stockings. The lucky fellow! They were in a dreadful state of bad repair when she came out to him at Rome, after the death of their father, the Reverend Miles Rumbold. George while at Rome painted “Caractacus;” a picture of “Non Angli sed Angeli,” of course; a picture of “Alfred in the Neat-herd’s Cottage,” seventy-two feet by forty-eight; (an idea of the gigantic size and Michael-Angelesque proportions of this picture may be formed, when I state that the mere muffin, of which the outcast king is spoiling the baking, is two feet three in diameter); and the deaths of Socrates, of Remus, and of the Christians under Nero respectively. I shall never forget how lovely Clara looked in white muslin, with her hair down, in this latter picture, giving herself up to a ferocious Carnifex (for which Bob Gaunter the architect sat), and refusing to listen to the mild suggestions of an insinuating Flamen; which character was a gross caricature of myself. None of George’s pictures sold. He has enough to tapestry Trafalgar Square. He has painted since he came back to England “The flaying of Marsyas;” “The smothering of the little boys in the Tower;” “A plague scene during the great pestilence;” “Ugolino on the seventh day after he was deprived of victuals,” &c. For although these pictures have great merit, and the writhings of Marsyas, the convulsions of the little prince, the look of agony of St. Lawrence on the gridiron, &c., are quite true to nature, yet the subjects somehow are not agreeable; and if he hadn’t a small patrimony, my friend George would starve.