From the first, Stuart had been worried about his son, who seemed to be so like himself; in the tantrums of the infant he had seen his own unstable nerves. Realizing that he had wasted much of his own life, he determined to save his son from the pitfalls into which he himself had fallen. He brought Charles Gilbert up with savage strictness. When the boy did things he saw his father do every day, his father recognized the symptoms he dreaded and flew into a fury. The years passed with much sternness arid many beat­ings, until at last the young man could be controlled no longer. Then he threw himself into dissipation with more abandon than his father had ever known. Stuart sat up many a night till dawn, waiting for the front door to open, and when at last the prodigal returned, pale, feverish, so drunk he could hardly stand, the old man wondered if this could be retribution.

The boy, who was so like Stuart himself, so talented, so uncon­trolled, wasted away under the influence of liquor and late hours. While his father watched in anguished helplessness, he grew thin­ner, more drawn, till he could hardly stagger to the haunts of his companions. At last he was too weak to get out of bed; Charles Gilbert died on March 10, 1813, at the age of twenty-six. Although the official record gave'the cause of death as consumption, Stuart felt that dissipation had killed his favourite son, and that it was all his own fault. The sad expression of his face grew sadder.

The poverty his own recklessness had caused, forced Stuart to bury Charles Gilbert in the strangers' tomb of Trinity Church; the funeral procession consisted of only one carriage. Unable to bear the house in which his son had died, Stuart moved to Roxbury, a suburb of Boston, where he again tried to forget the world in the calm of a rural landscape. He insisted on having cows and pigs. Friends noticed that the most childish things amused him now. An irascible servant, for instance, got into such a fury with Stuart's cow that Molly clambered somehow up the barn stairs; the next morning everyone was amazed to see her head sticking out of the upper window. "This," comments his daughter Jane, "was just the kind of thing to divert Stuart." He made his friends come out from Boston to see the cow, and was so amused that it took weeks of per­suasion from his wife and daughters before he would let Molly be brought down to earth.

He. delighted in infantile puns. "Mr. Stuart," a gushing lady would cry, "that is the greatest likeness I ever saw!"

"Draw aside the curtain and you will see a grater."

"There is no picture here."

"But there is a grater." He kept a snuff-grater behind the curtain on purpose.

His dependence on snuff became notorious.. David Edwin, the engraver, tells us that once when he was waiting in Stuart's drawing room, his host entered in great agitation, passed Edwin without a greeting, and began to rummage in a closet. Edwin, who had ex­perienced the painter's terrible temper, thought he must have of­fended him; he watched uneasily while Stuart found some tobacco, a grater, and a sieve. Although his hands trembled so violently that he could hardly hold his instruments, Stuart managed to grind some powder. After he hadinhaled it noisily/his uncommon tremor abated. Then he turned to Edwin with a smile. "What a'wonderful effect," he said, "a pinch of snuff has on a man's spiritsl"

Stuart had become, so irascible that his most intimate friends could no longer get on with him, and his wife and children kept out of his way as much as.they could. His daughter Jane com­plained that he took no interest in her artistic ambitions; he did not encourage her to work on pictures of her own, but kept her busy all day grinding his paints, laying in the backgrounds of his portraits. And woe to her if she made the slightest mistakel