they lived, and understand that, like the rest of us, they had a fair, or unfair, share of faults. Had Sir Joshua possessed twice as many failings, he would still remain one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of British portrait painters. Had he associated all the virtues with less achievement, he could not have interested us, because happily we do not judge art by the moral standard of the artist. Perhaps the most remarkable side of Reynolds' mind was seen in its response to the real truths that underlie all the arts. He held his work to be a mode of expressing human experience, he knew that there was a domain lying beyond the reach of rules, and bade his students look "with dilated eye," sacrificing detail to general effect for the sake of the best and most imaginative work. He declared without any reservations, that he had found art in England in the lowest possible state, he compared some of his contemporaries' work with sign-post painting, but his fine courage was only stimulated by the bad conditions that prevailed. He sought to raise them, and as a portrait painter, made it his business to discover the perfections of his sitters, with the result, that, as his genius was wholly interpretative, his pictures stand rather less for his sitters than for their time. A weak man might have succumbed to the temptations that beset Reynolds when he had established himself in Leicester Square. He was in a sense the darling of society, earning a larger income than had been gained by any of his contemporaries, although he painted for prices that a third-rate man could gain to-day, if we do not regard the changed value of money. But Reynolds never succumbed to society; he conquered it, showing himself worthy of all the success that came to him. He did his best, he worked hard, relaxing his efforts only when his position was unassailable, took his enjoyment temperately, if we consider the age in which he lived, and never forgot that his chief aim and object in life was to paint portraits, and to paint them as well as he could. There were years in which he completed from three to four portraits every week, but by the time he was President of the Royal Academy, the output had fallen to sixty or seventy a year, no small achievement for a man who was at liberty to enjoy all that was best, and brightest, and most enduring in London society, and everything most attractive in the country.