deficiencies as well as by their merits, show that the greatness or the general attractiveness of Gainsborough as a landscape painter is due not much to his naturalism--which was naturalism only in his own day, and is seen to have been almost idealism in ours. His greatness as a landscape painter consists much more in his continual endowment of Nature with the grace and magic of Style. * * * * * In Portraiture, the only failing that can be laid to Gainsborough’s charge--and it may at times be a serious one--is that he was apt to be less impressed by individuality of character than by the occasion which his subject presented for the painter’s triumph in brush-work. Facile observer as he was, and wonderful draughtsman, it was not often that he braced himself to such an effort of stern realism as was made in the portrait of ‘Judge Skinner.’ This light of the law, sitting robed--with the keen, sagacious face perfectly dominant over all the splendour of attire--was painted (on the canvas of which we are now speaking) for Christ Church, Oxford, of which in 1742 he had been a student; but the Grosvenor Gallery contains another, though a less admirable, presentment of the same person. This, though inferior, comes likewise from an unimpeachable quarter--it is lent by the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn. Of portraits of William Pitt, there are several by Gainsborough; but his best representation of all, of the young man who governed England, is that which comes, like the second portrait of Skinner, from Lincoln’s Inn. The natural charm of the model here accorded with that which was the frequent preoccupation of Gainsborough’s art, and sincere must have been the painter’s pleasure in dealing with a face which--like the face of Dickens in his youth, two generations later--expressed sweetness with firmness, and placidity with boundlessness of resource. The portrait of ‘David Garrick’ is less satisfactory as an effort of craftsmanship. The shrewd little lady who succeeded the great and genial Peg Woffington in Garrick’s love, declared that it was the ‘best portrait ever painted of her Davy,’ so we will not attempt to dispute the excellence of the likeness; but the thought that inspired the composition was comparatively trivial and commonplace. In a park-like scene, the background somewhat suggestive of Garrick’s favourite retreat at Hampton, the actor whose attentions were wont to be divided between the Tragic and the Comic Muse--as Sir Joshua has expressed so suggestively in his happy allegory--stands by a pedestal on which is placed the bust of Shakespeare, and Garrick has his arm round the bust, and almost familiarly caresses it. More valuable would have been a picture in which the head of the actor had been more dominant than the _dégagé_ gesture. The head of Garrick, however, if the story goes truly, was always a puzzle to Gainsborough. Of Garrick and of Foote--mobile comedians, baffling beyond all men--he