A sojourn of four years in London seems to have added little to his ability. Elegant in his manners, lively in his conversation, a born gentleman, he might have become completely the man of fashion. But he was far too diffident, with his naïve simplicity, to force himself amongst the stars of the world of art in London, far too distinguished and retiring to join in the race after the favour of the public, and so at the age of eighteen he returned to his native place with the unencouraging prospect of playing the part of a simple painter in the provinces. First and last, the woods remained his chief delight. One morning, as he was painting there, he looked up from his easel and saw a young and beautiful girl in a light summer dress, peeping coquettishly from behind the trunk of a tree. She blushed, he spoke to her shyly. Soon afterwards Margaret Burr became his wife, and the whole history of his life with her remains a charming idyll, like the spring morning on which he made her acquaintance. Married at the age of nineteen, he installed himself at Ipswich, his wife's native place, and there he spent fifteen years in great happiness, firm in the conviction that he would end his days there. There he painted his first portraits, which, from 1761, were forwarded by a carrier's cart to London for exhibition in the Royal Academy. From Ipswich he went to Bath, the fashionable watering-place, where he painted the visitors who came in the summer for the cure. Finally, in the end his portraits met with approval in London. That gave him courage in 1764 to proceed thither himself; and there he took very modest rooms. On his arrival he was as yet very little known; he came from the provinces, which he had till then never left, at a time when Reynolds stood at the pinnacle of his fame, and had visited Italy and Spain. Yet he gradually won a reputation. Franklin was one of the first to sit to him. Soon he became the favourite painter of the king and the royal family. George III was painted eight times by him, Pitt seven times, Garrick five. Lord Chancellor Camden, Sir William Blackstone, Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Richardson, Burke, Sheridan, Mrs. Graham, Lady Montagu, Mrs. Siddons, Lady Vernon, Lady Maynard, and the names of many other celebrities and beauties are bound up with his. His life-work, excluding sketches, consists of no more than three hundred pictures, of which two hundred and twenty are portraits--a very small number in comparison with the four thousand paintings of Joshua Reynolds. Thomas Gainsborough painted irregularly. Even when he was in his studio he might be seen standing for hours gazing out of his window dreamily at the grass. In other features of his life too he was equally different from Reynolds: unaccountably, he was one moment a brilliant, animated companion, the next plunged in melancholy. He dreamed much, while Reynolds painted and wrote. In the evenings he usually sat at home