BOOKS RECOMMENDED: Armstrong, _Sir Henry Raeburn_; Armstrong, _Gainsborough_; Armstrong, _Sir Joshua Reynolds_; Burton, _Catalogue of Pictures in National Gallery_; Chesneau, _La Peinture Anglaise_; Cook, _Art in England_; Cunningham, _Lives of the most Eminent British Artists_; Dobson, _Life of Hogarth_; Gilchrist, _Life of Etty_; Gilchrist, _Life of Blake_; Hamerton, _Life of Turner_; Henderson, _Constable_; Hunt, _The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_ (_Contemporary Review, Vol. 49_); Leslie, _Sir Joshua Reynolds_; Leslie, _Life of Constable_; Martin and Newbery, _Glasgow School of Painting_; McKay, _Scottish School of Painting_; Monkhouse, _British Contemporary Artists_; Redgrave, _Dictionary of Artists of the English School_; Romney, _Life of George Romney_; Rossetti, _Fine Art, chiefly Contemporary_; Ruskin, _Pre-Raphaelitism_; Ruskin, _Art of England_; Sandby, _History of Royal Academy of Arts_; William Bell Scott, _Autobiography_; Scott, _British Landscape Painters_; Stephens, _Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum_; Swinburne, _William Blake_; Temple, _Painting in the Queen's Reign_; Van Dyke, _Old English Masters_; Wedmore, _Studies in English Art_; Wilmot-Buxton, _English Painters_; Wright, _Life of Richard Wilson_. [Illustration: FIG. 94.--HOGARTH. SHORTLY AFTER MARRIAGE. NAT. GAL. LONDON.] BRITISH PAINTING: It may be premised in a general way, that the British painters have never possessed the pictorial cast of mind in the sense that the Italians, the French, or the Dutch have possessed it. Painting, as a purely pictorial arrangement of line and color, has been somewhat foreign to their conception. Whether this failure to appreciate painting as painting is the result of geographical position, isolation, race temperament, or mental disposition, would be hard to determine. It is quite certain that from time immemorable the English people have not been lacking in the appreciation of beauty; but beauty has appealed to them, not so much through the eye in painting and sculpture, as through the ear in poetry and literature. They have been thinkers, reasoners, moralists, rather than observers and artists in color. Images have been brought to their minds by words rather than by forms. English poetry has existed since the days of Arthur and the Round Table, but English painting is of comparatively modern origin, and it is not wonderful that the original leaning of the people toward literature and its sentiment should find its way into pictorial representation. As a result one may say in a very general way that English painting is more illustrative than creative. It endeavors to record things that might be more pertinently and completely told in poetry, romance, or history. The conception of large art--creative work of the Rubens-Titian type--has not been given to the English painters, save in exceptional cases.