155. With which question respecting treatment of character we have to connect also this further one: How is it that the attempts of so great painters as Reynolds and Gainsborough are, beyond portraiture, limited almost like children's? No domestic drama--no history--no noble natural scenes, far less any religious subject:--only market carts; girls with pigs; woodmen going home to supper; watering-places; gray cart-horses in fields, and such like. Reynolds, indeed, once or twice touched higher themes,--"among the chords his fingers laid," and recoiled: wisely; for, strange to say, his very sensibility deserts him when he leaves his courtly quiet. The horror of the subjects he chose (Cardinal Beaufort and Ugolino) showed inherent apathy: had he felt deeply, he would not have sought for this strongest possible excitement of feeling,--would not willingly have dwelt on the worst conditions of despair--the despair of the ignoble. His religious subjects are conceived even with less care than these. Beautiful as it is, this Holy Family by which we stand has neither dignity nor sacredness, other than those which attach to every group of gentle mother and ruddy babe; while his Faiths, Charities, or other well-ordered and emblem-fitted virtues are even less lovely than his ordinary portraits of women. It was a faultful temper, which, having so mighty a power of realization at command, never became so much interested in any fact of human history as to spend one touch of heartfelt skill upon it;--which, yielding momentarily to indolent imagination, ended, at best, in a Puck, or a Thais; a Mercury as Thief, or a Cupid as Linkboy. How wide the interval between this gently trivial humor, guided by the wave of a feather, or arrested by the enchantment of a smile,--and the habitual dwelling of the thoughts of the great Greeks and Florentines among the beings and the interests of the eternal world!