bittered. His sentimentality was of a peculiar
mischievous order, as it not only induced women to fall in love with
him, but enabled him to persuade himself that he was in love with them,
and apparently with more than one at a time.

While I was sitting to him for the beautiful sketch he gave my mother,
one or two little incidents occurred that illustrated curiously enough
this superficial pseudo-sensibility of his. On one occasion, when he
spent the evening with us, my mother had made me sing for him; and the
next day, after my sitting, he said in a strange, hesitating, broken
manner, as if struggling to control some strong emotion, "I have a very
great favor to beg of you; the next time I have the honor and pleasure
of spending the evening with you, will you, if Mrs. Kemble does not
disapprove of it, sing this song for me?" He put a piece of music into
my hand, and immediately left us without another word. On our way home
in the carriage, I unrolled the song, the title of which was, "These few
pale Autumn Flowers." "Ha!" said my mother, with, I thought, rather a
peculiar expression, as I read the words; but she added no further
comment. Both words and music were plaintive and pathetic, and had an
original stamp in the melancholy they expressed.

The next time Lawrence spent the evening with us I sang the song for
him. While I did so, he stood by the piano in a state of profound
abstraction, from which he recovered himself, as if coming back from
very far away, and with an expression of acute pain on his countenance,
he thanked me repeatedly for what he called the great favor I had done
him.

At the end of my next sitting, when my mother and myself had risen to
take leave of him, he said, "No, don't go yet,--stay a moment,--I want
to show you something--if I can;" and he moved restlessly about, taking
up and putting down his chalks and pencils, and standing, and sitting
down again, as if unable to make up his mind to do what he wished. At
length he went abruptly to an easel, and, removing from it a canvas with
a few slight sketches on it, he discovered behind it the profile
portrait of a lady in a white dress folded simply across her bosom, and
showing her beautiful neck and shoulders. Her head was dressed with a
sort of sibylline turban, and she supported it upon a most lovely hand
and arm, her elbow resting on a large book, toward which she bent, and
on the pages of which her eyes were fixed, the exquisite eyelid a