In another matter the husband was more indulgent. Maria was passionately fond of music, and he permitted her to exercise her gift of song at the brilliant companies invited to his magnificent abode. This completed the enchantment. Visitors came in such numbers that the house would scarcely contain them; and all who were fashionable, or had any aristocratic pretensions, were sure to be found in Cosway’s drawing-rooms. There would be the poet whose latest effusion was the rage in high circles; the author of the last sensation-speech in Parliament; any rising star in art, or any hero of a wonderful adventure; in short, all the lions of London were gathered in that place of resort, to see and to be seen, and, above all, to listen to the charming Cosway. The Honorable Mrs. Damer, Lady Lyttleton, the Countess of Aylesbury, Lady Cecilia Johnston, and the Marchioness of Townshend, were Maria’s most intimate friends, and were usually present to add splendor to her receptions; while among the men were General Paoli, Lords Sandys and Erskine, and his royal highness the Prince of Wales, the foreign embassadors being also invited upon special occasions. The mansion in Pall Mall was soon found too small to accommodate such an influx of visitors, and to display its master’s works and finery. A new one was taken in Oxford Street. Several of Cosway’s biographers mention the fact that the figure of a lion beside the entrance put it into some wag’s head to stick on the door an epigram that had a severe point, as the foppish little painter was “not much unlike a monkey in the face:” “When a man to a fair for a show brings a lion, ’Tis usual a monkey the sign-post to tie on; But here the old custom reversed is seen, For the lion’s without, and the monkey’s within.” The artist left the house in consequence of this foolish joke, and fitted up another in the same street, with the magnificence of a fairy palace. The author of “Nollekens and his Times” says: