In 1790 Romney paid another visit to Paris, the assiduous Hayley and the Rev. Thomas Carwardine going with him. They were received with great courtesy by the English ambassador and other persons of distinction, notably Madame de Genlis, then governess to the Duke of Orleans' children. Two years later, when Madame de Genlis came to London with Mlle. d'Orléans, and the mysterious ‘Pamela Sims’ (afterwards Lady Edward Fitzgerald), Romney, in graceful acknowledgment of his kind reception in Paris, began two portraits of Pamela, meaning to give Madame de Genlis the one she preferred. Both were, however, put aside unfinished. One was snapped up by Hayley, always a shrewd gleaner of unconsidered trifies in his friend's studio. Mr. H. L. Bischoffsheim is the present owner of one of the pair, a most piquant study of a dark-eyed girlish beauty.
Romney's chief undertakings in 1791 were his pictures for Boydell's ‘Shakespeare Gallery,’ an enterprise which secured his hearty co-operation. He indeed claimed, and no doubt justly, a considerable share in its inception, and made many happy suggestions as to the choice of subjects. He himself contributed three works—one illustrating ‘The Tempest,’ in which the Prospero was painted from Hayley, and two allegorical compositions, the ‘Shakespeare nursed by Tragedy and Comedy,’ already referred to, and ‘The Infant Shakespeare attended by the Passions.’ The coldness with which Reynolds at first treated the project may have been partly due to Romney's eager support of it. Side lights on the characters of the two painters are afforded by their respective dealings with the promoters. The practical Reynolds received 500l. before he touched his canvas of ‘Macbeth,’ and another 500l. on its completion, whereas Romney—dreamy, generous, and unbusinesslike—asked only six hundred guineas for his ‘Tempest,’ and received no payment for several years. The ‘Infant Shakespeare’ he presented to the gallery.
The Eartham visit of 1792 was made memorable by the presence of Cowper. The poet and the painter were mutually pleased with each other. There was, indeed, a strong affinity between them. Romney, during his visit, illustrated a passage in ‘The Task’ by a picture afterwards variously known as ‘Kate,’ as ‘'Twas when the Seas were roaring,’ and, from the type of the heroine, as ‘Lady Hamilton as Ariadne.’ He also made a drawing of the poet himself in crayon, ‘in his best hand, and with the most exact resemblance,’ says the poet in a letter to Lady Hesketh. Cowper repaid the compliment by the following sonnet:
Romney, expert infallibly to trace
On chart or canvas not the form alone
And semblance, but however faintly shown,
The mind's impression, too, on every face,
With strokes that time ought never to erase
Thou hast so pencill'd mine, that though I own
The subject worthless, I have never known
The artist shining with superior grace.
But this I mark—that symptoms none of woe
In thy incomparable work appear;
Well: I am satisfied it should be so;
Since, on maturer thought, the cause is clear;
For in my looks what sorrow couldst thou see,
When I was Hayley's guest, and sat to thee?
A letter to his son, describing this visit, shows that Romney's health had been very feeble throughout the year, but he declares himself better for the change. He continued to work industriously. In 1793 he painted, among other pictures, a portrait of Henry Dundas for Dundee University, and portraits of the Margrave and the Margravine of Anspach (Lady E. Craven); in 1794, ‘Newton making Experiments with the Prism,’ and portraits of the Duke of Portland, the Earl of Euston, and his own son. The latter came to stay with him, and, distressed at the nervous and ailing state in which he found his father, carried him off for a short visit to the Isle of Wight. Flaxman returned from Rome later in the year, and took a lodging in London ‘in the neighbourhood of our dear Romney.’ One of the painter's most interesting pictures of 1795 is the group of Flaxman, with his pupil, Hayley's young son, beside him, modelling a bust of the poet, while Romney looks on. In the autumn was begun the large picture of Lady Egremont and her children as ‘Titania with Fairies,’ painted partly at Eartham and finished at Petworth.
As Romney's health failed, the morbidly sensitive side of his disposition began to assert itself more and more. He became gloomy and irritable, his fits of depression alternating with moods of exaltation in which he planned undertakings on a colossal scale. He seems to have projected a Milton gallery on the lines of Boydell's Shakespeare. This, however, he kept a secret from all but Hayley, hinting at it, however, in letters to his son. ‘I have made,’ he writes, ‘many grand designs; I have formed a system of original subjects, moral and my own, and I think one of the grandest that has ever been
