Nature, it seems, in her singling out process, was particularly partial to Englishmen, for among those other painters who just barely equalled Reynolds’s transcendent genius was Gainsborough. Says the _Britannica_: “Gainsborough and Reynolds rank side by side.... It is difficult to say which stands the higher of the two.” Consequently hereafter we must place Gainsborough, too, along with Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt and Velazquez! Such a complete revision of æsthetic judgment will, no doubt, be difficult at first, but, by living with the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ and absorbing its British culture, we may in time be able to bracket Michelangelo, Reynolds, Rubens, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, Hogarth and Velazquez without the slightest hesitation. It is difficult to conceive how, in an encyclopædia with lofty educational pretences, extravagance of statement could attain so high a point as that reached in the biographies of Reynolds and Gainsborough. So obviously indefensible are these valuations that I would hesitate to accuse the _Britannica’s_ editors of deliberate falsification—that is, of purposely distorting æsthetic values for the benefit of English artists. Their total lack of discretion indicates an honest, if blind, belief in British æsthetic supremacy. But this fact does not lessen the danger of such judgments to the American public. As a nation we are ignorant of painting and therefore are apt to accept statements of this kind which have the impact of seeming authority behind them. The same insular and extravagant point of view is discoverable in the article on Turner. To this painter nearly five pages are devoted—a space out of all proportion to the biographies of the other painters of the world. Titian has only three and one-half pages; Rubens has only a little over three pages; and El Greco has less than two-thirds of a page! Of course, it is not altogether fair to base a judgment on space alone; but such startling discrepancies are the rule and not the exception.