Portrait of George IV of England

Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1769-1830

F the power of skillfully reproducing the things which lie on the surface, and of making from a showy subject an agreeable and often a handsome picture, constituted an artist a great portrait painter, Lawrence would hold a high rank. He had just the abilities for the work of his life, the task of making the likenesses of the nobility and royalty of England of his time, and with his great natural talent and industry we may well believe that he would have mastered higher lines of art if occasion had required.

He has certainly given us here a fine figure of a king, doing full justice to the magnificent subject. What a noble theme, too, for his art! The "first gentleman of England," the idolized model of tailors and dandies! What better form could he ask on which to hang a vast quantity of well-painted royal frippery?

George IV, after an ignoble and scandalous career as prince, became regent in 1811, by reason of the insanity of his father, George III. This monarch has never been highly rated in history, but he had a certain obstinate and illdirected firmness which entitles him to some regard. On his death in 1820, the regent became George IV, and was the royal figure head until his death in 1830. Of the duties of a good citizen, much less those of a king he had no care, but he made, in the hands of a skillful artist like Lawrence, a good picture, and doubtless had some amiable qualities.

Lawrence painted a large number of these state portraits, among others, the dignitaries at the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, and the heroes of Waterloo, now at Windsor Castle.

The Temple of the Sibyl, Tivoli, Italy

NE of the favorite excursions out from Rome leads to Tivoli, Subiaco, and Palestrina, up the valley of the Anio. Nature made this region agreeably wild and picturesque, and art, with the aid of time, has added the romance of legend and history, expressed in ruined temples and villas. At Tivoli

the restless mountain stream, gnawing for ages at the Travertine rock, and aided by the hand of man, pours its eager waters down the lofty precipice to the ravine, nearly three hundred feet below.

On a lofty rock almost overhanging the gorge through which the river flows below the falls, the Romans, before the time of the empire, built a beautiful little circular temple, of which the cella or central structure was only twenty-four feet in diameter, surrounded by eighteen graceful Corinthian columns, of which ten are still in place.

These slender columns, scarcely two feet in diameter, crowned by capitals with sharply cut acanthus leaves, carried a frieze, richly ornamented with garlands and the bucrania or conventionalized heads of oxen, as may be clearly seen in the parts remaining; all wrought with almost a Grecian delicacy and perfection.

From the terrace by the temple and the adjacent hotel, the full beauty of the falls and the landscape may be enjoyed. Not many miles away are the ruins of the marvelous villa, erected by Hadrian, perhaps the greatest builder of all the Roman emperors, while nearer at hand is the Villa d'Este, that magnificent country palace of the Renaissance.