In his fine painting-room during its first novelty Romney continued to receive visitors of high rank, and amongst other lovely personages the beautiful Mrs. Bosanquet and her children, as they stepped into the studio from their walk or drive, fresh as the Heath itself that they had crossed; the artist’s weary heart turning the while to his waiting wife, who through long years had endured, as Milton expresses it, ‘that greatest injury to the gentle spirit—the suffering of not being beloved, and yet retained.’ But now, when he had reached the desired position where, ‘without reference to gain or patronage, he was free to work out his most ambitious conceptions of art, his strength failed him, his hands shook,’ and after two years’ struggle in his mansion on the hill at Hampstead, where Hayley at this period found him ‘solitary and dejected,’ the mistaken man returned in the summer of 1799 to his faithful wife, whom he had only visited twice in thirty years, to learn, Howitt thinks, from her gentle, unreproaching tenderness how much he had lost by leaving her. It is a melancholy story, this, of man’s ambitious vanity, losing the zest of life for a vapour of laudation from the mouths of men, but a notice of Holly-bush Hill would be incomplete without it. He lingered, rather than lived, till 1802, and died November 15 of that year, reaching to nearly sixty-eight years of age, helpless as an infant. His Hampstead house and its contents were sold, but being ‘wholly without domestic accommodation, and the gallery and painting-room out of all proportion for family requirements,’ the use which Park assigns to it was no doubt the only practical one to which it could be appropriated. Prejudices, like old traditions, die hard at Hampstead, and I found in 1898 that some very odd ideas of Romney’s residence still obtained there. He was said to have lived for a few years at No. 5, The Mount, and had at the back of his garden, on Holly-bush Hill, an art-gallery or studio, a weather-boarded building of large size. It was said that the existing buildings (also weather-boarded) were the same, but my informant tells me that he was enabled to prove that this was only partially the case.