He had rivals--rivals whom he envied and adored--against whose giant hands his own seemed to him so feeble and puny; but their names were Rembrandt and Velasquez, Rubens and Reynolds, Titian and Correggio, Guido and Vandyke. To him art seemed a grand republic, a brotherhood in which success had no power to divide a man from his brethren. He was rich, and he spent his money royally, for he was as fond of splendour as Rubens himself; and he had not Peter Paul's affection for gold. Perhaps no man who was equally successful ever had so few enemies as William Crawford. Young men adored him, struggling men came to him for advice, disappointed men poured their wrongs into his ears and took comfort from his sympathy. He was the ideal painter, and he ought to have sat in the pillared hall of some old Roman palace, with a band of faithful followers watching the free sweep of his inspired hand, and an emperor in attendance to pick up his maulstick. In this man's house Philip Foley came and went as freely as if he had been a kinsman of the host; and coming from church on a Sunday evening, the pious inhabitants of Adelgisa Crescent were apt to be startled by the apparition of the young painter dressed in evening costume, and bending his footsteps westward in the dusty summer twilight. Sunday evening at the "Fountains" was a grand institution. On that evening the painter was at home to his friends; and as the name of his friends was legion, very pleasant company was to be met at Kensington between nine and twelve on every Sabbath in the season. Rank and fashion, literature and art, war and physic, law and diplomacy, poverty and wealth, jostled one another in those bright, airy drawing-rooms. The painter's fame was cosmopolitan, and foreigners from every court and capital brought him their tribute of admiration; and amidst this elegant crowd Florence floated hither and thither, radiant in the most dazzling toilettes that Madame Descou could devise, and inflicting anguish upon the souls of her adorers by the capricious distribution of her smiles. And Philip, who could find no phrase too bitter for his denunciation of her follies, came every Sunday evening to tell her he hated and despised her, and would henceforth make it his business to forget her existence, remained to adore her, and went back to Highbury more utterly her slave than before.