agnificent collection of original
drawings by the old masters, and precious gems of old and modern
art--the treasure-house of all the exquisite objects of beauty and
curiosity that he had gathered together during his whole life, and that
(with the exception of Raphael's and Michael Angelo's drawings, now in
the museum at Oxford) were so soon, at his most unexpected death, to be
scattered abroad and become, in separate, disjointed portions, the
property of a hundred different purchasers. Here, he said, he hoped
often to persuade my father and mother and myself to pass our unengaged
evenings with him; here he should like to make my brother John, of whom
I had spoken enthusiastically to him, free of his art collections; and,
adding that he would write to my mother to fix the day for my first
sitting for Juliet, he put into my hands a copy of the first edition of
Milton's "Paradise Lost." I never entered that room or his house, or saw
him again; he died about ten days after that.

Lawrence did not talk much while he took his sketch of me, and I
remember very little that passed between him and my mother but what was
purely personal. I recollect he told me that I had a double row of
eyelashes, which was an unusual peculiarity. He expressed the most
decided preference for satin over every other material for painting,
expatiating rapturously on the soft, rich folds and infinitely varied
lights and shadows which that texture afforded above all others. He has
dressed a great many of his female portraits in white satin. He also
once said that he had been haunted at one time with the desire to paint
a blush, that most enchanting "incident" in the expression of a woman's
face, but, after being driven nearly wild with the ineffectual endeavor,
had had to renounce it, never, of course, he said, achieving anything
but a _red face_. I remember the dreadful impression made upon me by a
story he told my mother of Lady J---- (George the Fourth's Lady J----),
who, standing before her drawing-room looking-glass, and unaware that he
was in the rooms, apostrophized her own reflection with this reflection:
"I swear it would be better to go to hell at once than live to grow old
and ugly."

Lawrence once said that we never dreamed of ourselves as younger than we
were; that even if our dreams reproduce scenes and people and
circumstances of our youth and childhood we were always represented, by
our sleeping imagination, at our present age. I pres