By Frederick Shum, F.S.A. 



50 



reputation. Shortly after his return from London, in 1745, at the 

 early age of eighteen, he married a young lady scarcely sixteen. 



Allan Cunningham, in his pleasant stories of the English painters,, 

 gives a romantic account of their first acquaintance, which Fulcher, 

 in his biography, cruelly mars by a prosaic explanation. After 

 careful inquiries, I believe the more poetical version to be equally 

 accurate. However, the union was a happy one. Miss Margaret 

 Burr, iu addition to her beauty and £200* a year, possessed many 

 estimable qualities, and among them caution, forbearance, and judg- 

 ment : characteristics of inestimable value in after life, for Gains- 

 borough lacked them all. She was of Scottish extraction, and is 

 generally believed to have been the natural daughter of an English 

 prince ; this was admitted by Mrs. Gainsborough, after her husband 

 had attained fame and position. 



An enthusiastic lover of Nature, a clever musician, warm-hearted 

 and impulsive, full of wit and humour, with intelligence and con- 

 siderable conversational powers, handsome presence, genial manners 

 and unaffected simplicity, he was welcomed in all circles. He became 

 a general favourite with his fellow -townsmen in Ipswich, as well as 

 with the neighbouring gentry. But he was a student and a lover 

 of his art ; conscious of his power and determined to excel, for he 

 had much to learn and not a little of his London art to unlearn. 



Towards the close of his residence in Ipswich he made the ac- 

 quaintance of an extraordinary character, Ralph Thicknesse, Governor 

 of Landguard Fort, who, on the title-page of his singular production 

 styled himself late Lieutenant-Governor of Landguard Fort, " un- 

 fortunately," father of George Touchet, Baron Audley. During 

 the winter season Thicknesse resided in Bath at St. Catherine's 

 Hermitage, in a picturesque dell, facetiously named by his friend, 

 Lord Thurlow, Gully Hall. Here in his garden, where Saxon and 

 Roman remains have been found, he erected a monument in memory 

 of Chatterton, and beneath it interred the remains of his own 

 daughter ; hard by, with strange incongruity, he placed the body 

 of his old travelling carriage, in which he had traversed the continent 

 of Europe. There it remained many years, a curious memento 

 of his vagaries and eccentricity. He was a man of great notoriety 



