fourteen guineas each! The March of the Guards to Finchley, so admirable in
composition, so full of incident and character, so rich in humor, could not
be sold by the artist, and he disposed of it in a lottery, in which many
tickets were left on his hands. And while this was the fate of works which
still stand unsurpassed in their peculiar field, the amateurs were paying
enormous prices for worthless pictures of second-rate Italian masters, and
talking about their "Correggios and Raphaels and stuff."

From Hogarth to Sir Joshua Reynolds is a wide step. Sir Joshua is well
represented here by some thirty pictures; and Gainsborough is at his side
with perhaps half as many. If Sir Joshua had not been a man of genius,
he would have been ruined by his academic principles. He laid down rules
which he constantly violated. He praised the Bolognese masters, and advised
all students of Art in Italy to study at Bologna; but he did not confine
himself to the study of other men's works, but sometimes gave himself, with
honest sincerity and affection, to the study of Nature; and thus it is that
it becomes hard to draw the line of praise between some of his pictures and
some of those by Gainsborough, and to say which are the best. Gainsborough
was no academician; he did not believe in conventionalities. When Sir
Joshua laid down as a rule that blue was bad as a prevailing color in
pictures, Gainsborough painted his famous Blue Boy, and made one of the
most charming portraits and pleasantest pictures that had ever been painted
in England. Look at Sir Joshua's delightful, winning Nelly O'Brien,--what
a happy picture of a girl!--and then look at Gainsborough's Mrs. Graham,
with her exquisite, perhaps even too exquisite, beauty; and see, not which
of the artists was the best, for that it is hard to see, but how great
both were as students and renderers of human nature. One of the best of
Reynolds's portraits is that of Foote, the actor. He is leaning over a
chair, and his laughing face is looking out from the canvas, as if he
were watching the effect of one of his own most brilliant and easy jokes.