An English painter who, were we to accept the Encyclopædia’s valuation, combines the qualities of several great painters is Charles Holroyd. “In all his work,” we learn, “Holroyd displays an impressive sincerity, with a fine sense of composition, and of style, allied to independent and modern thinking.” Truly a giant! It would be difficult to recall any other painter in history “all” of whose work displayed a “fine sense of composition.” Not even could this be said of Michelangelo. But when it comes to composition, Arthur Melville apparently soars above his fellows. Besides, “several striking portraits in oil,” he did a picture called _The Return From the Crucifixion_, which, so we are told, is a “powerful, colossal composition.” To have achieved only a “powerful” composition should have been a sufficiently remarkable feat for a painter of Mr. Melville’s standing; for only of a very few masters in the world’s history can it be said that their compositions were both powerful and colossal. El Greco, Giotto, Giorgione, Veronese, Titian, Michelangelo and Rubens rarely soared to such heights. But Melville, it appears, had a contemporary who, if anything, was greater than he—to-wit: W. Q. Orchardson, to whose glories nearly a page is devoted. “By the time he was twenty,” says his biographer, “Orchardson had mastered the essentials of his art.” In short, at twenty he had accomplished what few painters accomplished in a lifetime. A truly staggering feat! We are not therefore surprised to learn that “as a portrait painter Orchardson must be placed in the first class.” Does this not imply that he ranked with Titian, Velazquez, Rubens and Rembrandt? What sort of an idea of the relative values in art will the uninformed person get from such loose and ill-considered rhetoric, especially when the critic goes on to say that _Master Baby_ is “a masterpiece of design, color and broad execution”? There is much more eulogy of a similar careless variety, but enough has been quoted here to show that the world must entirely revise its opinions of art if the _Encyclopædia Britannica’s_ statements are to be accepted. Even the pictures of Paul Wilson Steer are criticised favorably: “His figure subjects and landscapes show great originality and technical skill.” And John Pettie was “in his best days a colorist of a high order and a brilliant executant.” George Reid, the Scottish artist, is accorded over half a column with detailed criticism and praise. Frederick Walker is given no less than an entire column which ends with a paragraph of fulsome eulogy. Even E. A. Waterlow painted landscapes which were “admirable” and “handled with grace and distinction”—more gaudy generalizations. When the Encyclopædia’s critics can find no specific point to praise in the work of their countrymen, grace, distinction, elegance and sentiment are turned into æsthetic virtues.