In spite of these emotions which I heard and saw Sir Thomas Lawrence express, I know positively that at his death a lady, who had been an intimate acquaintance of our family for many years, put on widow’s weeds for him, in the full persuasion that had he lived he would have married her, and that, the mutual regard they entertained for each other warranted her assuming the deepest mourning for him.  Not the least curious part of the emotional demonstrations I have described, was the contrast which they formed to Sir Thomas Lawrence’s habitual demeanor, which was polished and refined, but reserved to a degree of coldness, and as indicative of reticent discretion and imperturbable self-control as became a man who lived in such high social places, and frequented the palaces of royalty and the boudoirs of the great rival beauties of the English aristocracy.  On my twentieth birthday, which occurred soon after my first appearance, Lawrence sent me a magnificent proof-plate of Reynolds’s portrait of my aunt as the “Tragic Muse,” beautifully framed, and with this inscription:  “This portrait, by England’s greatest painter, of the noblest subject of his pencil, is presented to her niece and worthy successor, by her most faithful humble friend and servant, Lawrence.”  When my mother saw this, she exclaimed at it, and said, “I am surprised he ever brought himself to write those words—­her ’worthy successor.’” A few days after, Lawrence begged me to let him have the print again, as he was not satisfied with the finishing of the frame.  It was sent to him, and when it came back he had effaced the words in which he had admitted any worthy successor to his “Tragic Muse;” and Mr. H——­, who was at that time his secretary, told me that Lawrence had the print lying with that inscription in his drawing-room for several days before sending it to me, and had said to him, “Cover it up; I cannot bear to look at it.”

One day, at the end of my sitting, Lawrence showed me a lovely portrait of Mrs. Inchbald, of whom my mother, as we drove home, told me a number of amusing anecdotes.  She was very beautiful, and gifted with original genius, as her plays and farces and novels (above all, the “Simple Story”) testify; she was not an actress of any special merit, but of respectable mediocrity.  She stuttered habitually, but her delivery was never impeded by this defect on the stage; a curious circumstance, not uncommon to persons who have that infirmity, and who can read and recite without suffering from it, though quite unable to speak fluently.  Mrs. Inchbald was a person of a very remarkable character, lovely, poor, with unusual mental powers and of irreproachable conduct.  Her life was devoted to the care of some dependent relation, who from sickness was incapable of self-support.  Mrs. Inchbald had a singular uprightness and unworldliness, and a childlike directness and simplicity of manner, which, combined with her personal loveliness and halting, broken utterance,