had really been so happy and so playful, the mother's fine feathers must have been considerably ruffled, and she must have made haste to give the child back to the nurse. His children, too, are seldom of this world. Reynolds was a hardened old bachelor with an eye for beauty. He had not studied Bellini and Correggio for nothing, and many of his little ones are far more like Italian angels in modern dress than English boys and girls. Of course there are notable exceptions. "Master Crewe as Henry the Eighth" is delightfully English. "The Strawberry Girl" is another picture painted in hours of delightful inspiration, but "The Age of Innocence," for all its supreme beauty, has a certain quality of conception that is artificial. To look at Reynolds' women and children is to feel assured that the painter lived a celibate life, and that the stories about intrigues with Angelica Kaufmann and others are misleading and unfounded. We have but to turn to the work of his great contemporaries, Gainsborough and Romney, to see the difference between women in whose veins the blood runs red, and women who feed on nectar and ambrosia and were never seen at a disadvantage in their lives. It seems to the writer that women and children were to Reynolds fit and proper subjects for the exercise of his gifts, but at the same time, folk in whom he had no abiding interest. Men interested him, and when he turned the best of his attention to them, he gave the world work that will endure just as long as the pigments he put down upon the canvas.