Watts with exquisite simplicity. Again, just as in his diploma picture it had pleased Millais to invoke the name of Velasquez, and to perform a feat such as that to which Velasquez was most wont to address himself, so, in another canvas, in one sense more important--that of the three Miss Armstrongs playing whist with a dummy--it pleased him to follow visibly in the steps of Sir Joshua Reynolds--recalling his composition; the portrait group of the three Ladies Waldegrave being the one with which he on this occasion made it his business to vie. In 1879 Sir John was able to exhibit one of the masterpieces of portraiture--that record or idealisation of Mr. Gladstone of which the nobility and charm were instantly recognised--a canvas which of itself would be sufficient to prove that the faculty of poetic vision never finally deserted an artist who had seemed of late to concentrate his energy rather on dexterous execution than on the expression of profound feeling or elevated mood. The ‘Mr. Bright,’ which pretty closely followed the ‘Gladstone,’ was comparatively unsuccessful. And the illness of the sitter and the consequent incompleteness of his presentation on Millais’s canvas, made yet more disappointing the portrait of Lord Beaconsfield which hung upon the walls of the Academy in 1881. Next year, however, came the ‘Cardinal Newman,’ to atone for all that had been amiss--again a poetic vision, a worthy rising to the exigencies of a great theme, a performance at once decisive and tender, energetic, yet exquisitely suave. (_Standard_, 14th August 1896.) BURNE-JONES Unexpectedly and suddenly, from an attack of _angina pectoris_, following upon the pest of influenza, Sir Edward Burne-Jones died yesterday morning. He was sixty-five years old, and he looked worn for his age--a man of delicate appearance, and certainly of great sensitiveness; yet, as it had seemed already, of much staying power,--a ‘creaking gate,’ as his friends thought, not so very regretfully, since destined, in all probability, to ‘hang long.’ But now his work and life have been arrested; the laborious days which he had lived for forty years of manhood are for ever over, and the wan face of the untiring craftsman, which bent eagerly over his task, and brightened with quick sensibility in the relaxation of the social hour, is for ever still. ‘Finis’ is written to the volume of achievement of one of the greater practitioners in what we may call the second generation of the English Pre-Raphaelites.