to Mrs Papendieck, Colonel Martin, an officer of distinction, who had served at the siege of Gibraltar, proposed soon after the painter's return for the hand of his daughter, Cecilia, then a beautiful girl of seventeen. The Colonel was then heir-apparent to his brother, the Rev. Denney Martin, who had inherited the Castle and manor of Leeds from the Fairfaxes by his marriage with a daughter of that house, and one may well believe that Zoffany, with his taste for spending money, would have welcomed a closer connexion with such a suitor. The Colonel was, however, well over sixty years of age at this time, and Cecilia refused him. According to Mrs. Papendieck, the rejected suitor was so affected by this disappointment that he retired straightway to Leeds Castle and spent the rest of his life there in romantic seclusion. The disappointment, however, did not prevent him living to attain to the ripe age of eighty-eight.

Cecilia herself took bolder measures, and, to prevent her father' marrying her to someone she could not bear,' contrived (says Mrs Papendieck) to fall in love with Mr Thomas Horn, the middle-aged son of a Chiswick schoolmaster, an amiable man but extremely plain and otherwise unprepossessing. Thomas Horn was unable to resist the flattering assault; and in spite of the opposition of both families, the couple married in 1799. The resulting quarrel between the Horns and the Zoffanys seems to have continued after the marriage; but the painter, who, poor man, had had his fill of family dissensions, made the first step towards reconciliation, and before long we hear of him executing a portrait of old Dr Horn (the father) in full canonicals, which was by all accounts a capital likeness in the painter's neatest manner. It was now arranged that the Doctor should retire and let the young couple take on the school, and for a time all promised to go smoothly; but it was not long before the home of the young Horns was broken up by internal dissension. Cecilia had, it seems, an ungovernable temper; her younger sisters shared the defect; and, when the Misses Zoffany and Miss Horn began to interfere in the domestic arrangements of the school-house, the result was fatal to domestic peace. Before long Cecilia left her husband. Her violent temper was not the only fault she inherited from her father.

She was vain as well as passionate; and, as (according to Mrs Papendieck) 'her beauty never faded with increasing years, her vanity kept pace with them.' She never returned to the Manor House School and died in early middle age.

However, in spite of these misfortunes, Zoffany soon found his way back to his old style and apparently to royal favour. The Garrick Club possesses several pictures of Elia's favourites which must have been painted by him at this time; and in 1795 he executed, at the King's request, a scene from 'Speculation' (now at the Garrick Club), but nearly forfeited royal patronage by his dilatoriness in completing the commission. We may be certain too that he quickly resumed his old style of living, and took a prominent part in the social life of Kew and Chiswick. In 1792 he acted as pall-bearer to Aiton the botanist, with his old friend Sir Joseph Banks, Jonas Dryander (Aiton's assistant) and others. And it was probably about this time that he executed two pictures for churches of the neighbourhood, a St David playing on the harp for Chiswick, and a Last Supper, painted as an altar-piece, for the old proprietary chapel at Brentford. This latter picture, now housed in St George's Church, Brentford, is interesting as the largest accessible example of Zoffany's serious painting. Nothing more perfunctory than the angels and cherubs of the top and surviving wing of the triptych can be imagined; and in the main body of the picture the only part that is painted with any of the artist's usual conviction is the negro boy in the foreground. The Christ is conceived in a vein of the most lamentable sentiment. None the less, the picture has always enjoyed a considerable local reputation. The figures of the apostles are said to have been painted from local fishermen; and tradition (which here reminds one of the legends of the Calcutta picture) says that local interest in the work was so great and the likenesses so good that the models were ever afterwards known by their apostolic names, a circumstance which greatly irritated the gentleman who had the misfortune to act as the model for Judas.

Nor did Zoffany's activities end here. In 1794 he was on the Council of the Royal Academy, and he continued to exhibit until 1800, by which date he must have been

at least seventy years old. Between 1790 and 1795 he showed nothing; but in the latter year there was hung at the Academy a large, crowded and very lively canvas of the plundering of the royal cellars in Paris on May 10, 1793. His last really prolific year would seem to have been 1794, for the Exhibition contained, besides some theatrical portraits, the Hyderbeck picture and a 'Susannah and the elders' from his hand. In 1804 he should have acted on the Council again, but the Academy records show that he was abroad. I have been able to discover nothing about this journey, but it is a remarkable evidence of his vitality, for he must have been nearly seventy-five years old, and his health had been enfeebled by two strokes of paralysis. In 1810 he died and was buried in Kew Churchyard near the grave which contains the bodies of his friend Gainsborough, and also those of Gainsborough's wife and of his nephew Gainsborough Dupont.

Mrs Zoffany lived on till 1832, and must have retained much of her charm, for it is recorded that her husband's old friend, the indomitable Nollekens, actually proposed marriage to her in 1817, the eightieth year of his age. Possibly the offer was partly a charitable one, for there is a strong tradition that Zoffany succeeded before he died in dissipating the money which he had made in India. Moreover, it seems probable, from Seguier's scanty records of the prices paid for his work about the time of his death, that he had experienced a considerable falling-off in popularity. At any rate, gallant old Nollekens left the widow 300l. in his will, and she survived him to enjoy the legacy sixteen years. Poor lady, let us hope that her decline was reasonably peaceful. There can have been but little peace in her existence with Johann Zoffany, R.A.

CHARLES TENNYSON.

Art. 4.-SOME TIBETAN ABBEYS IN CHINA.

THE maps of China are neatly, clearly coloured, definitely outlined; so far go Yunnan, Szechuan, Kansu, and then, at a tidy red boundary line, begins Tibet, also considered as a Chinese province. This pleasing precision of statement is, however, a very false guide; only when he nears the spot does the traveller realise that, for effective purposes, Tibet is far indeed from being a Chinese province, and that half of Kansu, half of Szechuan, half of Yunnan, form the Tibetan Marches, a debateable belt of land more than a hundred miles deep and a thousand miles in length, composed entirely of tremendous Alpine systems, and quite impervious to such weapons of conquest as China has at her disposal. For all up this vague vast frontier the Kwenlun fades away eastwards into China from supporting the Roof of the World, in a rippling series of mountain ranges and profound river valleys so abrupt, so corrugated, so complicated, that even the resources of the British Empire might well take half a century to reduce to real submission a territory so much vaster and so much more difficult than anything with which we have had to do along the comparatively simple line of the Himalaya. The position of China to the Tibetan Marches is, in fact, very much the same, on a gigantic scale, as that of Edward the First's England to the Welsh, or Henry the Seventh's to the Scottish. And it is of no use for China to pursue King Henry's policy: no Margaret Tudor will meet the case, though Imperial Princesses have occasionally been tried for the part; for there is no valid secular authority in Tibet or its Marches, either central or local: the whole country is under the spiritual supremacy of the Church, an organism as impregnable as Rome's, even though Chinese Emperors have from time to time been able to displace a Dalai Lama, as Theodora was able to displace one Pope, and Napoleon another.

Chinese methods, however, and Chinese requirements, are different from ours. Where mountains begin, there utilitarian China's interest leaves off. Land that cannot be cultivated is land with which China does not care to concern herself. But, for the sake of her prestige, and

of the rare profitable patches that may occur in the Alpine valleys, China both asserts and maintains a certain sovereignty over the Tibetan Marches. That sovereignty, though, depends for its existence on its limitations, and the tactfulness of its methods. All that China exacts from the March Provinces, in fact, is a reasonable amount of safety for Chinese subjects, engaged in trade or cultivation along the comparatively open districts and routes. There is a tacit convention that, if this state is attained, China will not trouble the mountains and their inhabitants with any vexatious and unprofitable assertion of authority. Tibetans and Chinese accordingly keep asunder, parted by acute mutual dislike and contempt; and half of Yunnan, Szechuan, and Kansu, nominally Chinese, are in fact purely Tibetan territories, where the Chinese exist and trade only on sufferance in the richer portions, a solitary Chinaman hardly being safe, after Tatsien-lu, even on the great Imperial highroad to Holy Lhasa. Such limited authority, however, is all that China needs: her practical spirit sees no profit in the effective conquest of wild and barren mountains, even if such a conquest could be attained without a disproportionate and ruinous expenditure of money and men, and without rousing against her the whole force of the hierarchy, from Urga to Lhasa, an overwhelming popular power which the Empire has always had the good sense to respect and conciliate and take under its wing, even to the conferring of the 'Great-Ocean-of-Wisdom' title by which the Supreme Pontiff is known all over the world to this day.

Now and then, however, troublesome friction occurs on the Marches: the Governors of Sungpan, Tatsienlu, Batang have little more effective power beyond their own Yamens than the Amban at Lhasa himself; and often there arises trouble from raiding Tibetan villagers, or from some turbulent abbey, contemptuous of China's temporal authority, and secure in its spiritual affiliation to remote Lhasa. Accordingly, in the last days of the Grand Dowager, the Manchurian Line roused itself to a real effort at reducing the Marches effectively under Chinese sway. A drastic General was despatched, with efficient forces, and did so ably conduct his campaigns as to succeed in thoroughly subduing the March of Szechuan,