Thornhill had not all his domes and ceilings and staircases to himself. When Augustus found Rome of brick and left it of marble, he did not execute all the quarrying and chiselling with his own imperial hands. In 1727, the painter M.P. for Melcombe Regis was at the high tide of celebrity. Many of the Flemish ells were covered by assistants. Here, I fancy, Van Shackaback of Little Britain, and sometime of Ghent in the Low Countries, was dexterous at war and art trophies, lyres, kettle-drums, laurel wreaths, bass-viols, and S. P. Q. R.’s, charmingly heaped up on a solid basis of cloud. Then little Vanderscamp, who had even been employed about the great king’s alcoves at Versailles, was wondrous cunning at the confection of those same purple and cream-coloured vapours. Lean Monsieur Carogne from Paris excelled in drapery; Gianbattista Ravioli, ex-history painter to the Seigniory of Venice, but vehemently suspected of having been a galley-slave in the Venetian arsenal, was unrivalled in flying Cupids. All these foreign aides-de-camp sprawled on their mattresses and made their fancy’s children to sprawl; goodman Thornhill superintending, touching up now and then, blaming, praising, pooh-poohing, talking of the gusto, taking snuff, then putting on his majestic wig and his grand laced hat, and departing in a serene manner in his coach to St. James’s or the House, thinking perhaps of one Rafaelle who painted the _loggie_ and _stanze_ of the Vatican, and of what a clever fellow he, James Thornhill, was.