Of the fancy pictures, on which Gainsborough’s fame chiefly rests, we are disposed to give the preference to his _Cottage Children_. There is, we apprehend, greater truth, variety, force, and character, in this groupe, than in any other. The colouring of the light-haired child is particularly true to nature, and forms a sort of natural and innocent contrast to the dark complexion of the elder sister, who is carrying it. _The Girl going to the Well_ is, however, the general favourite. The little dog is certainly admirable. His hair looks as if it had been just washed and combed. The attitude of the _Girl_ is also perfectly easy and natural. But there is a consciousness in the turn of the head, and a sentimental pensiveness in the expression, which is not taken from nature, but intended as an improvement on it. There is a regular insipidity, a systematic vacancy, a round, unvaried smoothness, to which real nature is a stranger, and which is only an idea existing in the painter’s mind. We think the gloss of art is never so ill bestowed as on subjects of this kind, which ought to be studies of natural history. It is perhaps the general fault of Gainsborough, that he presents us with an ideal common life, whereas it is only the reality that is here good for any thing. His subjects are softened and sentimentalised too much, it is not simple, unaffected nature that we see, but nature sitting for her picture. Gainsborough, we suspect, from some of the pictures in this collection, led the way to that masquerade style, which piques itself on giving the air of an Adonis to the driver of a hay-cart, and models the features of a milk-maid on the principles of the antique. The _Girl and Pigs_ is hardly liable to this objection. There is a healthy glow in the girl’s face, which seems the immediate effect of the air blowing upon it. The expression is not quite so good. The _Fox-dogs_ are admirable. The young one is even better than the old one, and has undeniable hereditary pretensions. The _Shepherd Boys_ are fine. We do not like the _Boys with Dogs fighting_. We see no reason why the one should be so handsome and the other so ugly, why the one should be so brown and the other so yellow, or why their dogs should be of the same colour as themselves: nor why the worst-looking of the two should be most anxious to part the fray. The sketch of the _Woodman_, the original of which was unfortunately burned, fully justifies all the reputation it has acquired. It is a really fine study from nature. There is a picture of Gainsborough’s somewhere of _A Shepherd Boy in a Storm_, of which we many years ago saw an indifferent copy in a broker’s shop, but in which the unconscious simplicity of the boy’s expression, looking up with his hands folded, and with timid wonder, the noisy chattering of a magpye perched above him, and the rustling of the coming storm in the branches of the trees, produced a romantic pastoral impression, which we have