Who shall do justice to the crowds that thronged the studio? Certainly mere words cannot picture the scenes that the old house in Leicester Square witnessed in those stirring times. Deafness could hardly have been an unmixed evil to a man whose sitters were of the most diverse kind. Leslie and Taylor in their voluminous work, "The Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds," have written at length upon this aspect of the painter's daily life, and have described the constant stream of men and women who could not have been placed side by side for five minutes save on the walls of the exhibition. Representatives of the most opposed school of politics, High Church dignitaries, courtesans, soldiers, flaneurs, society women, sailors, ambassadors, actors, children, members of the Royal Family, men from the street, like White the paviour--one and all claimed the measure of immortality that his brush confers, and if his best work could but have retained its qualities, the latter half of the eighteenth century would be preserved for us in fashion calculated to make future generations envious. Unfortunately, Sir Walter Armstrong, the painter's most trenchant latter day critic, is justified when he writes: "Speaking roughly, Sir Joshua's early pictures darken, the works of his middle period fade, those of his late maturity crack. The productions of his first youth and of his old age stand best of all." When the worst has been said, it is a glorious heritage that the painter left to his country, but who can avoid regrets when thinking what it might have been if Reynolds had mastered the secrets of permanent colour, if the carmine and lake had endured, and the more brilliant effects had not been so largely experimental--if he had given them a fair trial in studies before he used them for his best work? Perhaps his success left no time for experiments. Sitters were urgent and could not wait while the painter studied the question of the chemistry of pigments.