PLATE IV.—THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER: A Portrait.
Shy, something of a recluse, impressionable, with delicate perceptions that made him a favourite among women, he was a man of good physical strength and robust appearance. According to Cumberland, he talked well. His harangues on art were "uttered in a hurried accent, an elevated tone, and very commonly accompanied by tears, to which he was by constitution prone." We are also informed that a noble sentiment never failed to make his eyes to overflow and his voice to tremble.
The early biographies of Romney were written to counteract one another. Hayley's foolish volume of 1809 was composed to correct the "coarse representation" of Cumberland, which was published in the European Magazine. Cumberland was a sensible man, and he wrote well. The useful but too appreciative volume by his son, John Romney, was a counterblast to Hayley. Later lives have been George Paston's admirable study, and the indispensable Catalogue Raisonné by Mr. W. Roberts, with a biographical and critical essay by Mr. Humphry Ward, which also includes the text of Romney's Diaries from 1776 to 1795, acquired at Miss Romney's sale in 1894.
Romney lived in an age when men and women of sensibility wrote poems of praise to one another. Cowper's is perhaps the best known.
"But this I mark, that symptoms none of woe
In thy incomparable work appear."
It is poor stuff; but better than the effusions of Hayley, Miss Seward, and John Halliday.