This marvel was none other than Thomas Lawrence, the future painter of innumerable portraits of the wealthy and the noble, who rose to be P.R.A. and to knighthood at the hands of George the Fourth. His father, at this time landlord of the “Bear,” seems to have been a singularly close parallel to Mr. Micawber in fiction, and to Mr. John Dickens in real life. The son of a Presbyterian minister, and articled to a solicitor, he turned aside from writs and affidavits and practical things of that kind, to the making of verses; and the verse-making, by a sort of natural declension, presently led him to fall in love, and to run away with the pretty daughter of the vicar of Tenbury, in Worcestershire. He tried life as an actor, and that failed; as a surveyor of excise, with little better result; and then became landlord of the “White Lion” at Bristol, the house in which his son Thomas, the future P.R.A., was born, in 1769. In 1772 he removed to Devizes, and took the “Bear”: not an inconsiderable speculation, as the description of the house, already given, would lead one to suspect. Some unduly confiding person must have lent the shiftless, but engaging and gentlemanly, fellow the capital, and it is to be feared he lost by it, for although in the pages of _Columella_, a curious work of fiction published at that time, Lawrence is styled “the only man upon the road for warm rooms, soft beds, and--Oh, prodigious!--for reading Milton,” his innkeeping was a failure. Notwithstanding those “warm rooms and soft beds,” which rather remind you of Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s lines in _The Mountebanks_-- Excellent eating, Good beds and warm sheeting, That never want Keating, Afford a good greeting To people who stop at my inn-- Lawrence had to relinquish the “Bear.” He was known as a “public-spirited landlord, who erected at his own expense signal-posts twelve feet high, painted white, to guide travellers by night over Salisbury Plain”; but, although he was greatly commended for that public spirit, no profit accrued from it. Public spirit in a public-house--even though it be that higher order of public-house styled an hotel--is out of place. At the early age of five the innkeeper’s son Thomas became distinctly an asset. He was as many-sided as a politician who cannot find place in his own party and so, scenting opportunities, seeks preferment with former enemies. Young Lawrence it would, however, be far prettier to compare with a many-faceted diamond. He shone with accomplishments. A beautiful boy, his manners, too, were pleasing. He was kissed and petted by the ladies, and to the gentlemen he recited. He painted the portraits, in curiously frank and artless profile, of all guests who would sport half a guinea for the purpose, and between whiles would be found in the yard, punching the heads of the stable-boys, for he was alike born painter and pugilist!