In any classification of his works, the first place must necessarily be given to his figure paintings and portraits. Indeed, they make up the bulk of his achievement, and represent the fullest growth of his capacity. The history of his life is principally written in them. The charm of his personality distinguishes them all--a charm as evident in the simpler and more limited subjects as in those which made great demands upon his powers of invention and contrivance. There was never any suggestion that he did not honestly feel the motive with which he was dealing, or that he was not perfectly convinced that what he had chosen was worthy of record. If he failed, it was because he had misapprehended the suitability of his material, not because he had been trying to do something outside the range of his belief. Curiously, perhaps, his honesty and directness were at the same time the source of what was best in his pictures, and the cause of their chief weaknesses. Had he not been so frank and wholesome-minded he could never have arrived at that exquisite appreciation of the daintiness of childhood to which he gave expression in a great many of his most successful canvases, and could never have gained, as he did, the hearts of all classes of art lovers. Only a worshipper of children, with the most absolute sympathy with their ways and habits, could have painted pictures as persuasive as _Cherry Ripe_, _A Waif_, _Caller Herrin'_, _The Princess Elizabeth_, and that long series of pretty studies of which _Perfect Bliss_, _Dropped from the Nest_, _Forbidden Fruit_, and _Little Mrs. Gamp_ may be quoted as types. Only a man with the happiest sense of delicate shades of character could have commanded the extraordinary popularity that came to him as a result of his production of pictures such as these. Yet it was to these very qualities that was due his occasional want of success in dealing with stronger themes. His dramatic pictures descended at times into an artlessness that was only redeemed from feebleness by its obvious sincerity. They failed because he concerned himself so much with matters of fact that he missed the greater possibilities of the subjects he had selected, and because in his desire to be real and convincing he forgot that there was a need to appeal to the imagination of people who would not be satisfied with plain statements. [Illustration: THE VALE OF REST.]