However, the habits of a lifetime are not easily thrown over. During his early English period, much of the solidity he had taught himself in Boston remained. The bodies under the more subtly painted silk of his portraits were firm, and he was still fascinated, despite himself, by the crudely accurate depiction of some intel­lectual face. In his historical paintings, the.realism his mind decried still issued from the sinews of his painting hand; over and above the bombast of its central group, The Death of Chatham was a col­lection of shrewd portraits. And when his imagination tottered on its insufficient wings, habit still carried him back to concrete mod­els; as we have seen, he laid siege to Gibraltar in his studio. But little by little the habits he built up during his Colonial career re­laxed. The body and form drained from his paintings; when he dis­carded realism, sincerity went with it, and then there was nothing left, for his imagination lacked the strength to soar.

Thus we may explain much of the weakness of Copley's later paintings, but there is another important consideration which must needs escape those critics who separate an.artist's life from his work; the deterioration of his art was accompanied by a deterioration in his personality. Although Copley had always been timid and un­social, in Boston he had been universally respected, and he had risen to what was heroism for his character in his attempts to stop the revolution. Yet his later yearsin London show him as mean, cantankerous, envious, quarrelsome, vindictive. Minor contre­temps, as we have seen, served to embitter him for years. It is prob­able that his nerves and health had gone back on him, that he suffered from premature senility. Although he lived to be seventy-seven, at sixty he had all the characteristics of a broken and dis­gruntled old man.

The stinginess that had always been part of his character became a ruling passion. The Academy female model, Farington tells us, usually got a shilling an hour. "She is very modest in her deport­ment, notwithstanding her habit of exposure, and was lately mar­ried to a shoemaker. She spoke of Copley's behaviour to her, who would make her sit a longer time than she could well bear to, and would "scarcely pay her half-price. She had resolved not to go to him any more."

He became so crusty that it was news if he was polite to one of his fellow-artists. "Copley," Farington wrote in 1807, "found me in the room alone and accosted me civilly, the first time in several years. He appeared to me to have suffered much in his faculties; his mind seemed to be incapable of comprehending what was going forward." Three years later, Farington noticed on his face a look of imbecility.

In 18) j Morse wrote home: "I visited Mr. Copley a few days since. He is very old and infirm. I think his age is upward of seventy, nearly the age of Mr. West. His powers of mind have almost en­tirely left him; his late paintings are. miserable. It is really a lamentable thing that a man should outlive his faculties,"

For almost twenty years Copley struggled through the twilight of old age. Always lacking money, he painted continually in an un­ceasing effort to produce a great picture, to secure an important commission. Occasionally he had a nervous collapse, but as soon as he was well again he picked up his brushes and returned to his studio. However, all his efforts were in vain, for the tide had set irrevocably against him. When he asked the King to sit again, His Majesty snubbed him before the whole court. "Sit to you for a por­trait! What, do you want to make a show of me?" He spent four years on an equestrian portrait of the Prince Regent that no one would purchase. When the British Institution paid three thou­sand guineas for West's Christ Healing the Sick, he set to work immediately to work on a vast Resurrection, but the British Insti­tution showed no inclination to buy it. "It makes me melancholy," wrote Mrs. Copley, "when I see his rooms so full of pictures that are highly spoken of, and I think with how much perplexity they were produced."

Copley's son had already started on the brilliant career that was to make him Lord Chancellor of England and finally Lord Lynd-hurst, but for the moment his income was small, and he could contribute little to the family support. The painter was continually forced to borrow from his American son-in-law; the little letters in which he asked for one more loan are stiff with mortified pride. But even the loans that were never refused'did not serve to keep up his large establishment on George Street. After the failure of Copley's Resurrection, James Heath, the engraver, told Faring-ton that Copley would have to sell everything he owned, including his house, which was already heavily mortgaged. He pointed out that Copley had become very unpopular as an artist. At about this time, Mrs. Copley wrote to her daughter: "We are, indeed, revolv­ing what changes we can make, and whether to quit George Street. The difficulty of leaving our present situation is that it would in a, great measure oblige your father to give up the pursuit of the arts; and I fear that if he should retire from them in the latter part of his life, he would feel the want of the gratification which the pur­suit has accorded him."