PLATE II.—SKETCH PORTRAIT OF LADY HAMILTON.
Sir Joshua, at work in Leicester Square, realised that the stream of fashion flowing to his studio had been diverted. He did not refer to Romney by name! He merely called him "the man in Cavendish Square," and be sure that some candid friend repeated to him Thurlow's public declaration: "The town is divided between Reynolds and Romney; I belong to the Romney faction."
If you think that plain-speech Thurlow exaggerated, glance at the verbatim transcript of Romney's Diaries, giving the names and appointments of his sitters, printed in the monumental work by Mr. Humphry Ward and Mr. W. Roberts. In less than twenty years over nine thousand sittings in the house in Cavendish Square are recorded.
If the stones of Cavendish Square had language! To No. 32 came Warren Hastings, Burke, Thurlow, Garrick, John Wesley, lords and ladies innumerable, the two lovely Ramus girls, the beautiful Mrs. Lee Acton, Mrs. Mark Currie, Mrs. "Perdita" Robinson, and the adorable Miss Vernon. Other men seek elation in wine, or spring, in Mozart or Grieg; Romney found it in the flash of a new face, "lit with the shock of eager eyes." Thither came the pretty Gower, Clavering, Warwick, and Horsley children, and one day in 1782 that "divine lady" Emma, when Romney was forty-eight. In she floated, laughter in her eyes, joy on her lips, sunshine in her presence—shadowed by her cavalier, Charles Greville, whose emotions were as precisely under control as running motor to a chauffeur. Thus joy entered into his life, and joy left him, when, nine years later, he painted Emma for the last time after her marriage to Sir William Hamilton. The syren having departed he was soon to be on his way—a broken man, still ambitious but ineffectual—to the arms of deserted Griselda, patiently awaiting her faithless husband in Kendal.
Having reached this point in my meditations, I came abreast of No. 32, and found a brand-new, pleasing house, without tablet or bust. Sir Joshua marched conquering to the goal: Romney fell before the last lap. I paced the square and thought of his life that has given immortality to so many. The eighteenth century is vocal on the canvases of her great painters. The other day I saw the two Ramus girls smiling from a wall in a house by Henley-on-Thames, and they seemed more alive than the goggled, huddled women that had just flashed along the highroad in a motor car. And as I mused by the trees in Cavendish Square, dominated by that vast crane—the sign-mark of new London—cutting the sky, I saw clearly the three periods of Romney's life symbolised by a Horse, a House, and the words Home Again.