the quaint, merry, crowded, landscape conversation-picture called “A View of the Mall, St. James’s Park,” but this evocation of the _beau monde_ of the day promenading in cinnamon coats and peach-bloom breeches, and the ladies in every Chanticler colour and vagary, has been attributed by some authorities to Samuel Wale, R.A. Mr. Fairfax Murray is the fortunate owner of “A Fishing Party,” a small picture, nineteen by twenty-one and a half inches, which shows that Hogarth, besides his other gifts, was a master in romantic composition. On the border of a lake sit the fishing party--a charming lady, a nurse, and a child in the full light, and a reflective gentleman in the shade. The baby holds the rod, the pretty mother guides it, and the float toys with the water. I protest that you rarely if ever see in these days so charming a portrait group composition as this designed by the Father of English Painting, who virtually had no forebears, and who turned from one branch of art to another with something of the ease of myriad-minded Leonardo. I suspect he studied the grace of Van Dyck’s compositions. Some of the early Victorian members of the New English Art Club would find it disadvantageous to pit themselves against the technical accomplishment of his tight, highly-finished “Lady’s Last Stake.” The subject is banal, and half-a-dozen Dutchmen could have painted this interior with more quality of surface and closer observance of light, but it is “done,” and the paint has not faded and cracked as have so many works painted two hundred years later. “The Lady’s Last Stake” was a commission from Lord Charlemont. In 1757, in one of his periodical fits of vexation, Hogarth said he would “employ the rest of his time in portrait painting,” but three years afterwards we find him, in weathercock mood, “determined to quit the pencil for the graver.” Lord Charlemont begged him, before he “bade a final adieu to the pencil,” to paint him one picture. The result was this morality of the handsome, wicked officer, and the young and virtuous married lady. Mrs. Thrale was wont to allege that she sat for the fair gambler. “The Stay Maker” should hang beside Watteau’s “Gersaint’s Sign,” each a representation of a costumier’s shop, each a masterpiece, but as it is impossible to bring together these two works by these two geniuses who were contemporaries, and who brought about the rebirth of art in France and England, I am quite content that “The Stay Maker” should remain where it is, helping to decorate an exquisite room in Mr. Edmund Davis’s house. There is only one other picture on the wall--a Gainsborough portrait. “The Stay Maker” is a sketch, almost in monochrome, showing a man-milliner measuring a lady, while another mondaine kisses a baby fondly, but not on its chubby face. This little picture (thirty-five by twenty-seven inches) is full of life and gaiety, and is as delicate in its humour as “The Enraged Musician” at Oxford is forcible.