When personal gossip about these fashionable beauties was rampant upon every tongue; when the first appearance of one of them in a new mode was enough to ensure her being enviously or admiringly mobbed in the Mall, naturally the portrait-prints in colour responded to the general curiosity. But there was a public which, having other pictorial fancies than portraiture, even pretty faces could not satisfy without the association of sentiment and story. So there were painters who, recognising this, furnished the engravers with the popular subject-picture. It was well for their link with posterity that they did so, for how many of them would be remembered to-day were it not for these prints? One of the most prominent was William Redmore Bigg, who won a great popularity by painting, with the imagination of a country parson, simple incidents of rustic and domestic life, charged with the most obvious sentiment. The people took these pictures to their hearts, and they were a gold-mine to the engravers. As to their artistic qualities we have little opportunity of judging to-day except through the familiar prints. These are innumerable, and they all have a conventional prettiness. In colours the most pleasing, perhaps, are the _Saturday Morning_ of Burke, the _Saturday Evening_ and _Sunday Morning_ of Nutter; _Dulce Domum_ and _Black Monday_ of John Jones; _Romps_ and _Truants_ of William Ward; _Shelling Peas_ and _The Hop Picker_ of Tomkins; _College Breakfast_, _College Supper_, and _Rural Misfortunes_ of Ogborne, _The Sailor Boy’s Return_ and _The Shipwrecked Sailor Boy_ of Gaugain.