ing himself
the Swedish Count, Frederic de Horn, with fine manners and handsome
person, offered himself to Angelica. He represented that he was
calumniated by his enemies and that the Swedish Government was about
to demand his person. He assured her, if she were his wife, she could
intercede with the Queen and save him. She blindly consented to the
marriage, privately. At last, she confessed it to her father, who took
steps at once to see if the man were true, and found that he was the
vilest impostor. He had a young wife already in Germany, and would
have been condemned to a felon's death if Angelica had been willing.
She said, "He has betrayed me; but God will judge him."

She received several offers of marriage after this, but would accept
no one. Years after, when her father, to whom she was deeply devoted,
was about to die, he prevailed upon her to marry a friend of his,
Antonio Zucchi, thirteen years her senior, with whom she went to Rome,
and there died. He was a man of ability, and perhaps made her life
happy. At her burial, one hundred priests accompanied the coffin,
the pall being held by four young girls, dressed in white, the four
tassels held by four members of the Academy. Two of her pictures were
carried in triumph immediately after her coffin. Then followed a grand
procession of illustrious persons, each bearing a lighted taper.

Goethe was one of her chosen friends. He said of her: "She has a most
remarkable and, for a woman, really an unheard-of talent. No living
painter excels her in dignity, or in the delicate taste with which she
handles the pencil."

Miss Ellen C. Clayton, in her interesting volumes, _English Female
Artists_, says, "No lady artist, from the days of Angelica Kauffman,
ever created such a vivid interest as Elizabeth Thompson Butler. None
had ever stepped into the front rank in so short a time, or had in
England ever attained high celebrity at so early an age."

She was born in the Villa Clermont, Lausanne, Switzerland, a
country beautiful enough to inspire artistic sentiments in all its
inhabitants. Her father, Thomas James Thompson, a man of great culture
and refinement, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, was a warm
friend of Charles Dickens, Lord Lytton, and their literary associates.
Somewhat frail in health, he travelled much of the time, collecting
pictures, of which he was extremely fond, and studying with the eye
of an artist the beauties of each country, whether Amer