ashion, Romney rendered
"Fair Emma" in many guises. Her ability in acting made her a most
useful model. Her features had much mobility, and were capable of
expressing, with facility, all gradations of passion and niceties of
feeling. Emma took pride and pleasure in serving Romney. He repeated
to his friend, the poet Hayley, her request, that in the biography of
the painter, Hayley would have much to say of her. One of his earliest
classical conceptions painted from her, was a full length of Circe
with her wand. Following this was a "Sensibility," which became the
property of Hayley. Though we remember Romney chiefly in connection
with his Lady Hamiltons, yet he had acquired his reputation and much
fortune ere he met her. The great bulk of his portrayals of the
nobility preceded his classical subjects, which took form from his
superb model. She was Cassandra; she was Iphigenia, St. Caecilia,
Bacchante, Calope, The Spinstress, Joan of Arc, The Pythian Princess
Calypso, and Magdalene,--the two latter subjects painted to order for
the then Prince of Wales.

Allan Cunningham has this to say in his sketch of Romney's life: "A
lady in the character of a saint. This sort of flattery, once so
prevalent with painters, is now nearly worn out: we have now no Lady
Betty's enacting the part of Diana; no Lady Jane's tripping it
barefoot among the thorns and brambles of this weary world, in the
character of Hebe. We have none now who either 'sinner it or saint it'
on canvas; the flattery which the painter has to pay is of a more
scientific kind,--he has to trust alone to the truth of his drawing
and the harmony of his colors."

Romney was a transgressor in this way at times; but Lady Hamilton's
form was used to impart correct form to the conceptions of the
painter,--not the theme used merely to exploit the beauty of the lady.
In the exhibition of fair women in the Grafton Gallery in London this
summer, she greeted us in the guise of Ariadne. In this the painter's
use of the title was apt and justifiable. Here is the lady wholly
clothed in the dress of the time,--a dress superb in its simplicity;
but her pose and mien is indicative of the forsaken, the forlorn,
despairing woman abandoned by her lover,--the fate of which the old
story of the Greeks is the eternal epitome. The pathos of the pose, it
may have been, as well as the classic face, allured the wanderer in
the galleries, and anchored him before this canvas.

The fame of Romn