George Romney, like Shakespeare, was born of humble parents in a remote country town. Dalton, in Lancashire, is further from London than Stratford, but as I do not pretend to draw the parallel too closely, I will confine myself to a short account of Romney’s circumstances only. He was born on December 15, 1734. His ancestors, yeomen of good repute, lived near Appleby, in Westmorland, but took refuge during the Civil Wars in the neighbouring county. His father was a joiner, which in those days included the trade of carpenter and cabinet-maker, and George was apprenticed to him. How and at what period the love of painting came upon him has not been clearly shown. Cumberland asserts that it was inspired by the cuts in the [Illustration: EMMA, LADY HAMILTON National Portrait Gallery] _Universal Magazine_. Hayley says that he consumed the time of his fellow-workmen in sketching them in various attitudes, while John Romney states that Lionardo’s treatise on painting, illustrated by many fine engravings, was early in his hands. Cumberland describes him as “a child of nature who had never seen or heard of anything that could elicit his genius or urge him to emulation, and who became a painter without a prototype.” At nineteen, however, he was apprenticed for four years to a painter called Count Steele, who was practising in the neighbouring town of Kendal. During this time he fell in love with a young lady of some little fortune, Mary Abbot, and on October 14, 1756, he carried her across the border to Gretna Green and married her. His precipitate marriage drew upon him the rebuke of his parents, but he vindicated himself with some firmness and skill. “If you consider everything deliberately,” he wrote, “you will find it to be the best affair that ever happened to me; because if I have fortune I shall make a better painter than I should otherwise have done, as it will be a spur to my application; and my thoughts being now still, and not obstructed by youthful follies, I can practise with more diligence and success than ever.” According to Hayley, he soon perceived that his marriage was an obstacle to his studies; that he was ruined as an artist, and that he might bid farewell to all hopes of fame and glory, although he was devoting himself with all his might to his work. “The terror of precluding himself from those distant honours,” says Hayley--to whom, by-the-by, we are under no obligation to believe more than we wish--“by appearing in the world as a young married man, agitated the ambitious artist almost to distraction, and made him resolve very soon after his marriage, as he had no means of breaking the fetters which he wildly regarded as inimical to the improvement and exertion of his genius, to hide them as much as possible from his troubled fancy.”