less, cold
as English approbation of talent may seem, his works were welcomed here as
few works of art have been welcomed. His extreme modesty was somewhat
against his success: he was fearful of being thought presuming and forward;
and has been known to shrink from introductions to men of rank and talent,
from a doubt of his own deservings. A letter to me from Mrs. Forster, a
lady distinguished by her own talent as well as from being the daughter of
Banks the sculptor, contains the following passage:--'When Bonington
visited England, in 1827, I gave him a letter of introduction to Sir
Thomas Lawrence, but he returned to Paris without having delivered it. On
my inquiring why he had not waited on the President, he replied,--"I don't
think myself worthy of being introduced to him yet, but after another year
of hard study I may be more deserving of the honour." The following spring
he went to London with his pictures; those which brought him such well
merited fame. He carried a letter from me to Sir Thomas, which he
presented, and was received into his friendship; but, alas! it was of
short duration; for the great success of his works, the almost numberless
orders which he received for pictures and drawings, together with
unremitting study, brought on a brain fever, from which he recovered only
to sink in a rapid decline.' All other accounts concur with that of Mrs.
Forster, in attributing his illness to the accumulation of pressing
commissions: he viewed the amount with nervous dismay; he became deeply
affected; his appetite failed; his looks denoted anguish of body and mind;
a quick and overmastering consumption left him strength scarcely
sufficient to bring him to London, where he arrived about the middle of
September, 1828. The conclusion of his career was thus related to Mrs.
Forster by Sir Thomas Lawrence:--'Your sad presage has been too fatally
verified; the last duties have just been paid to the lamented Mr.
Bonington. Except in the case of Mr. Harlow, I have never known, in my own
time, the early death of talent so promising, and so rapidly and obviously
improving. If I may judge from the later direction of his studies, and
from remembrance of a morning's conversation, his mind seemed expanding in
every way, and ripening into full maturity of taste and elevated judgment,
with that generous ambition which makes confinement to lesser departments
in the art painfully irksome and annoying.

"But the fair guerdon when