ume he spoke of his
own experience, and I cannot say that I recollect any instance in mine
that contradicts this theory. It seems curious, if it is true, that in
the manifold freaks of our sleeping fancy self-consciousness should
still exist to a sufficient degree to preserve unaltered one's own
conditions of age and physical appearance. I wonder whether this is
really the common experience of people's dreams? Frederick Maurice told
me a circumstance in curious opposition to this theory of Lawrence's. A
young woman whom he knew, of more than usual mental and moral
endowments, married a man very much her inferior in mind and character,
and appeared to him to deteriorate gradually but very perceptibly under
his influence. "As the husband is, the wife is," etc. Toward the middle
of her life she told him that at one time she had carried on a double
existence in her sleeping and waking hours, her dreams invariably taking
her back to the home and period of her girlhood, and that she resumed
this dream-life precisely where she left it off, night after night, for
a considerable period of time,--poor thing!--perhaps as long as the
roots of the young nobler self survived below the soil of a baser
present existence. This story seemed to me always very pathetic. It must
have been dismal to lose that dream life by degrees, as the real one ate
more and more into her nature.

Of Lawrence's merit as a painter an unduly favorable estimate was taken
during his life, and since his death his reputation has suffered an
undue depreciation. Much that he did partook of the false and bad style
which, from the deeper source of degraded morality, spread a taint over
all matters of art and taste, under the vicious influence of the "first
gentleman of Europe," whose own artistic preferences bore witness, quite
as much as the more serious events of his life, how little he deserved
the name. Hideous Chinese pagoda pavilions, with grotesque and monstrous
decorations, barbarous alike in form and in color; mean and ugly
low-roomed royal palaces, without either magnificence or simplicity;
military costumes, in which gold and silver lace were plastered together
on the same uniform, testified to the perverted perception of beauty and
fitness which presided in the court of George the Fourth. Lawrence's own
portrait of him, with his corpulent body girthed in his stays and
creaseless coat, and his heavy falling cheek supported by his stiff
stock, with his dan