minor example--is the ‘Landscape with Figures against a Tree’: one of the very few dated pictures. It is of the year 1775, or just about the time that the painter left Bath for London. It is interesting as seeming to belong to an earlier period, as carrying on to a time when most of his work had changed character, the features of his more youthful work. It is a bit of every day English scenery, accepted for what it is, with a tolerance of the commonplace rare with him, indeed in any day, but, as one would have thought, quite impossible to his later life. Here, too, is one of his few failures to attain what was really beautiful, ‘A Landscape with Cows,’ lent by the trustees of the Duke of Newcastle--an artificial scene of blue distance and of hot and ‘unconvincing’ foreground. ‘A View in Shropshire’ is in character not less classical, not less suggestive of Claude, but it is far more successful. The foreground is of wooded country, brown and gold; behind it, a richly illuminated champaign ends abruptly in a conical hill, which is the Wrekin beheld in the light of a selected hour. The Catalogue of the Exhibition--full of industriously compiled detail and of quaint anecdote, carefully burrowed for in half-forgotten places--might, perhaps, have chronicled the fact that the great picture we are speaking of is repeated, feature by feature, in another. But this other happens to be hung so high that its merits we can hardly estimate. Its pedigree, however, is unimpeachable. The little ‘Landscape with Horses Ploughing’ recalls, in the disposition of its objects, Turner’s ‘Windmill and Lock,’ and Turner, who was never above taking suggestions--who took them from every one--may possibly have seen it. Lord Bateman’s ‘Boys and Fighting Dogs,’ though by no means among the most attractive things, is at least memorable. It shares with several other pictures the business of proving that as a draughtsman of animals--certainly as a draughtsman of dogs--Gainsborough had few rivals; and it is one of the rare instances of Gainsborough’s painting what is properly called a subject picture--a picture in which the portrayal of an incident has been the first care. Furthermore, the boys here--like that uncouth child, ‘Jack Hill, in a Cottage’--are, at all events, perfectly natural examples of everyday folk. Generally his cottage urchins, though they have rustic grace and rustic wildness, though they roll on the greensward and dabble in the brook, are not profound studies of a real peasantry; and, though Leslie indeed said of the ‘Girl with a Pitcher’ that nothing more beautiful had ever been painted, we may remember that this lavish appreciation by a brother artist who was invariably generous was bestowed at a time when the graver aspects of the peasant’s life had, as far as pictorial art is concerned, been mirrored only in the art of Turner. The student of to-day, the student of Millet, can hardly single out for truthfulness,