It was of this same copy of the Transfiguration that Canova had spoken so applaudingly: 'This, sir, seems rather the work of eighteen weeks than of eighteen days.'
He gave a picture of 'The Presentation of the Cardinal's Hat to Wolsey in Westminster Abbey' to the Academy of St. Luke's at Rome, and his own portrait to the Academy of Florence, in acknowledgment of having been elected a member. He embarked for England in January 1819. Lord Burghersh, the English ambassador at Florence, had paid him marked attentions. Lord Liverpool gave instructions that the painter's packages should be passed at the Custom House. He established himself in a house, No. 83 Dean Street, Soho. Everything seemed to promise to him a happy and prosperous future, when suddenly he sickened with the disease, known popularly as the mumps. He died on the 4th February 1819, and was buried under the altar of St. James's Church, Piccadilly. In the churchyard had been buried, a year or two previously, an artist of less merit,--James Gillray, the caricaturist.
It is not possible to lay great stress upon the early failings of Harlow; errors, after all, rather of manners than of morals. Had he lived, it is likely that a successful career would have almost effaced the recollection of these, while it would certainly have contradicted them as evidences of character. As Lawrence said of his dead pupil, generously yet truthfully, 'he was the most promising of all our painters.' There was the material for a great artist in Harlow. He died too young for his fame, and for his art. A proof engraving of one of his best works (a portrait of Northcote) was brought to Lawrence to touch upon:--
'Harlow had faults,' he said, 'but we must not remember the faults of one who so greatly improved himself in his art. It shall never be said that the finest work from so great a man went into the world without such assistance as I can give.'
The difficulty the vulgar have experienced in comprehending that kings and queens, and generally persons high in authority, are simply men and women after all--their ordinary appearance, dress, manners, and habits not greatly different from those of the rest of mankind--has been a frequent subject of remark and ridicule. Years back, at the American theatres, spectators in the pit were often gravely asking each other, whether the sovereign of England was really accustomed to appear in the London streets, wearing a similar wonderful costume to that in which Mr. Lucius Junius Booth was then strutting and ranting as Richard the Third; the fact of the Drury Lane copies of the dresses worn at the coronation of George IV. having been taken to the other side of the Atlantic, and _The Coronation_ performed at most of the chief cities, supplying, perhaps, an apology for the reasoning which prompted the inquiry. But the popular notion, that a monarch habitually walks about carrying on his head a jewelled crown of enormous value and weight, finds a reflection in higher stages of culture and intelligence. An analogous delusion is traceable amongst people occupying very reputable rounds upon the social ladder. A state of confusion between a man and his office, or his works, is by no means confined to those whom it is the fashion to designate as 'the masses.' Are we not continually meeting ladies and gentlemen, of otherwise commendable intellectual endowments, bent upon bewildering themselves with the notion, that the sentimental novelist is necessarily a creature of sentiment--that the comic actor, out of his part and off his stage, is still laughable and amusing--that the writer of poetry, as a consequence, lives poetry, and the career of the painter is inevitably picturesque?