painting. "I have often," said he, "seen Cosway at the elder Christie's picture-sales, full dressed in his sword and bag, with a small three-cornered hat on the top of his powdered toupée, and a mulberry silk coat profusely embroidered with scarlet strawberries." Such was the dress of those whom princes delighted to honour, before change, as with besom, swept away, among some worse and many worthier things, all this magpie splendour.

The consequence which Cosway thus early in life ssumed, he was prepared to maintain both by his talents and assiduity. He seems not to have coveted earnestly the applause which follows the painting of works of a high historic order, though he tried his success in that unprofitable style as well as Barry and Fuseli: he aspired rather to reign king in the little pleasing paradise of miniature; to gratify the ladies by the softer graces of his pencil was, he thought, honour enough; and in that kind of flattery, no one excelled him. He had, however, other claims to public notice; his drawings from the antique were graceful and accurate: to copy with a pencil the fine flowing outline of a Grecian statue, and catch the true proportions, require a fine eye and a skilful hand and Cosway seems to have had both. This sort of practice he acquired in the Duke of Richmond's gallery. His outlines caught the eye of Bartolozzi, who, with Cipriani, pronounced them admirable. And as it was believed that Reynolds carried the grand style of Michael Angelo into his full-sized portraits, so it was thought that Cosway introduced a touch of the grace and dignity of the antique into his fashionable miniatures: his commissions augmented accordingly. It was well observed by one of his surviving friends, that he inclined more to the neat, the graceful, and the lovely, than towards the serene, the dignified, and the stern: and though his admiration of the antique was great, this was modified by his continual

studying of living nature, and from a taste for what ever was soft and elegant."

Besides the income which arose from his fine drawings and his numerous miniatures, Cosway derived occasional sums from old paintings which he purchased, repaired, and sold to such customers as had galleries to fill or rooms to decorate. This kind of trade, in skilful hands, has been found lucrative; but Cosway, whatever he might earn by his pencil or by his bargaining, was no hoarder: his outlay kept pace with his income. He had expensive tastes: he was fond of old weapons, old armour, old books, and old furniture: and delighted in entertaining his friends splendidly. He wrought, or as artists prefer to say, studied hard: but he also lived hard : it was his pleasure to spend his money in the society of high and dissipated people, who laughed in secret at his folly, and while they encouraged his extravagance to his face, derided it without mercy behind his back. They swallowed his champagne, gambled him out of the price of a dozen miniatures at a sitting, and then entertained their friends by giving caricatured accounts of his conduct and conversation, to which the lampoon of Dighton was but a joke. Cipriani used to relate, that though Cosway would pass a whole night, nay, nights, in this kind of frivolous society, he never found him in bed, let him call ever so early next morning. He rose with remorse at heart: laboured hard by day to repair the waste of the night and formed, all the while, good resolutions, which dispersed of their own accord when the lamps were lighted, and the hour of appointment approached. Nor did he escape reproach from others, or from himself, for worse transgressions: he was sometimes employed in imbodying the loose ideas of licentious associates, and in furnishing lascivious miniatures for snuff-boxes, sold in secret, and produced in company by men whose imaginations are, perhaps, the least delicate parts

about them. These offences, however, it is to be hoped, were committed seldom at all events, they happened early in life: and it must also be borne in mind, that manners were, in those days, less restrained than now: our fathers had not our delicacy of eye and purity of speech, though probably nothing behind us in any of the essentials of virtue.

Amid all this waste and vanity, Cosway was rising in reputation. In 1761, he was elected Royal Academician; and imagining it necessary to support his new dignity by fresh efforts of his pencil, he sent to the exhibition, for several successive years, a few pictures, chiefly of that kind which pertain to portrait and poetry. The Rinaldo and Armida were suggested by Tasso, and the heads were supplied by two of his titled sitters; a miniature in the character of Cupid was of the same stamp; so was the child enacting St. John. The "Portraits of a Lady and her Son in the character of Venus and Cupid ;" the "Madonna and Child," portraits; and the "Portrait of a Young Lady in the character of Psyche," explain themselves. He exhibited various others; but these were the chief. Their beauty and elegance brought many admirers, and raised a little envy in the bosoms of some of his brethren. It is true that they spoke with compassion of Cosway's glossy and feeble portraits, with scorn of his foppery in dress, and were not a little sarcastic on the fine company which he kept; but then they lamented the sad taste of the times more, and the want of judgment in the high places, and thanked their stars that they had too much genius to be popular. All this, Cosway perhaps did not know, and certainly could care little for: his good opinion of his own merits covered him as a cloak; and, besides, he was not likely to set down the admiration of peeresses and princes to his want of merit. The houses in which he lived have been held in remembrance. When the caricatnre of the Macaroni Miniature Painter came out, he lived

in Orchard-street, Portman Square: when he kept a black servant, and wore a coat of mulberry silk, ornamented with scarlet strawberries, his house was in Berkely-street; and when he became a husband, and had the Prince of Wales for his patron, he lived in Pall Mall, in the middle lodging of that extensive house built for the Duke of Schomberg.

There were two events in the life of Cosway which had, for a long while, a great influence over him: one was the familiar notice-the painter called it friendship-of the Prince of Wales; and the other his marriage with Maria Hadfield, a young lady of talent and beauty. The notice of the prince was pleasing to the man and to the artist. The stayed stateliness and quaker-like sobriety of the court of George III., and the gaudy magnificence and reckless gayety of Carlton House in those days, contrasted like the light and darkness of an historical picture. I mean not to say that Cosway was among the number of those who joined the prince in his wilder sallies nevertheless he was of his train, and voyaged with him for a time,

"Down pleasure's stream with swelling sails."

During this period of court favour, Cosway married Maria Hadfield. She was a native of Italy, but of English parentage; and, besides her wit and beauty, had such taste and skill in art as rendered her worthy of the notice, when but eighteen years old, of Reynolds and Fuseli, and other masters of the English school. In addition to these attractions there was something romantic in her story. Her father kept an hotel for the accommodation of travellers on the Arno and such was his prosperity, that he was enabled to live, in process of time, like a wealthy gentleman. Four of his babes died suddenly and in succession; and when Maria, who was the fifth, was born, a trusty servant resolved to keep watch, for foul play was surmised. One day a favourite maid-servant went into the nursery, took the child

in her arms, and dandling it, said, "Pretty little creature! I have sent four before thee to heaven: I hope to send thee also." Being instantly seized and interrogated, she owned that she had destroyed the other four children out of love, for of such was the kingdom of heaven. She was imprisoned for life. Maria was educated in a convent, where she learned music and drawing. On her return home she studied painting, went to Rome for a time, and became acquainted with the first artists, Battomi, Mengs, Maron, Fuseli, Wright of Derby, and contemplated art in the noble sculptures and subblime paintings of the palaces and churches. On the death of her father she desired to go into a nunnery but her mother to wean her from this wild scheme brought her to England, where conversations with Angelica Kauffman shook her faith in the nunnery, and her marriage with Cosway soon sealed her conversion. From this time it becomes the duty of the biographer, in relating the history of the painter, to remember the genius of his wife.

Her foreign manners and extreme youth induced Cosway to keep his wife secluded till she mastered the language, and, by intercourse with intimate friends, acquired a knowledge of society. She studied art, too, under her new instructer; and with such success, that almost the first time she was seen in public she was pointed out as the lady who had painted some of the most lovely miniatures in the Royal Academy Exhibition. Her reputation was made at once; nothing was talked of but the great youth and the great talent of Mrs. Cosway; and one half of the carriages which stopped at her husband's door contained sitters ambitious of the honours of her pencil. The painter, however, was too proud a man to permit his wife-much as he admired her talents-to paint professionally; this, no doubt, was in favour of domestic happiness, but much against her success in art. The impulse which professional