than a hundred-and-fifty in a year; but it must not be taken as an average for any great length of years. Again, when we look at the names of his most distinguished patrons, the list is not as long or as imposing as those of Reynolds and Gainsborough. The latter had the patronage of Royalty, besides a good number of the aristocracy, while Reynolds had, if I may be allowed the expression, “mopped up” all that was most brilliant in beauty, birth, and genius, leaving very little for anybody else. The Catalogue of the Exhibition of National Portraits held at South Kensington in 1867, enumerates but twenty pictures by Romney, and as many as a hundred and fifty by Reynolds. That Romney’s sensitive disposition and retiring habit of life may in some degree account for his not being more widely popular in his own time is no doubt true. But apart from any other consideration there is no question that a fine portrait by Reynolds is a more satisfying possession than any but the very finest by Romney, and a characteristic one by Gainsborough more exhilarating. Though there is at least one instance in which he “wiped Reynolds’s eye,” namely, with his magnificent head of _John Wesley_, which was painted in 1789, when Wesley was eighty-six years old. “At the earnest desire of Mrs T.,” the old man wrote, “I once more sat for my picture. Mr. Romney is a painter [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A LADY AND CHILD (1782) National Gallery] indeed! He struck off an exact likeness at once, and did more in an hour than Sir Joshua did in ten.” Still, there is a variety of qualities in Reynolds’s and Gainsborough’s pictures that we do not find, or expect to find, in those of Romney--a fact which must be taken into account in comparing the number of their respective portraits exhibited in 1867. The stream of popular taste steadily ebbed during the century following Sir Joshua’s death, and it is only of late years that Romney has been “discovered” and restored to public favour. A great deal of Romney’s present-day popularity I cannot help thinking is attributable as much to the delectable quality of his ladies’ faces as to the classic simplicity of treatment which makes them what they are.