rvice, but she soon left him to become housemaid under a lady of
decent family--a very respectable person. In her house she acquired a
taste for novels, and then for the play. She studied the gestures and
vocal inflections of the actors, and rendered them with remarkable
facility. These talents, neither of which pleased her mistress in the
very least, were the cause of her dismissal. It was then that, having
heard of a tavern where painters were in the habit of meeting, she
conceived the idea of going there to look for employment. Her beauty
was then at its height.

She was rescued from this pitfall by a strange chance. Doctor Graham
took her to exhibit her at his house, covered with a light veil, as
the goddess Hygeia (the goddess of health). A number of curious people
and amateurs went to see her, and the painters were especially
delighted. Some time after this exhibition, a painter secured her as
a model; he made her pose in a thousand graceful attitudes, which he
reproduced on canvas. She now perfected herself in this new sort of
talent which made her famous. Nothing, indeed, was more remarkable
than the ease Lady Hamilton acquired in spontaneously giving her
features an expression of sorrow or of joy, and of posing marvellously
to represent different people. Her eyes a-kindle, her hair flying, she
showed you a bewitching bacchante; then, all of a sudden, her face
expressed grief, and you saw a magnificent repentant Magdalen. The day
her husband presented her to me, she insisted on my seeing her in a
pose. I was delighted, but she was dressed in every-day clothes, which
gave me a shock. I had gowns made for her such as I wore in order to
paint in comfort, and which consisted of a kind of loose tunic. She
also took some shawls to drape herself with, which she understood very
well, and then was ready to render enough different positions and
expressions to fill a whole picture gallery. There is, in fact, a
collection drawn by Frederic Reimberg, which has been engraved.

To return to the romance of Emma Lyon. It was while she was with the
painter I have mentioned that Lord Greville fell so desperately in
love with her that he intended to marry her, when he suddenly lost his
official place and was ruined. He at once left for Naples in the hope
of obtaining help from his Uncle Hamilton, and took Emma with him so
that she might plead his cause. The uncle, indeed, consented to pay
all his nephew's debts, but also decided t