CHILDHOOD. 3 



place was being taken by the highly finished miniatures 

 on ivory of which Cosway had been the most famous 

 executant in the previous generation. The fashion had 

 now filtered down to the lower middle class, and it was 

 become the practice for artists not of the highest rank to 

 go round the country from town to town, staying long 

 enough in each place to paint the heads of such clients as 

 they met with. Thomas Gosse, who had worked under 

 Edward Penny, R.A., had preserved something of the dry 

 manner of that pupil of Hudson's, but had learned from 

 his own long practice in mezzotint engraving to draw with 

 accuracy. Never inspired or in any way first-rate, his 

 miniatures are nevertheless fairly accomplished, and the 

 best of them possess a certain delicate charm of colour. 

 But he had no introductions, he shrank with extreme 

 timidity from any advertisement of himself, and during 

 the first years of his new profession he sank lower and 

 lower into the depths of genteel poverty. When he 

 entered Worcester in 1807, the fortunes of the gentle, 

 melancholy, unupbraiding man were at their nadir. He 

 was in his forty-third year, and he was ready to despair 

 of life. 



In his perambulations he had several times visited the 

 city of Worcester, for which he professed a special par- 

 tiality. His particular patrons and friends were a Mr. 

 and Mrs. Green, people of wealth and education, at whose 

 table the miniature-painter, with his tags of Theocritus 

 and his Parson Adams' manner, was always welcome. On 

 this occasion he met for the first time a fresh inmate of 

 their establishment, a Miss Hannah Best, a very handsome 

 and powerfully built girl of twenty-six, who occupied an 

 ambiguous position, half lady's-maid, half companion, in 

 the Green household. The fact was that she had run away 

 from her own home to escape the tyranny of her mother. 



