When he died, his friend Edmund Burke wrote in the funeral oration which he dedicated to him: "Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on many accounts, one of the most memorable men of his time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and harmony of colouring, he was equal to the greatest masters of the renowned ages.... In full affluence of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert in art and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed by sovereign powers and celebrated by distinguished poets, ... the loss of no man of his time can be felt with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow." He was buried with great pomp in St. Paul's Cathedral. The pictures left unfinished at his death fetched at auction £37,000; the whole fortune which he left is estimated at £80,000. The biography of _Thomas Gainsborough_ reads quite differently. The traveller who rides from London to Birmingham passes through some of the fairest scenery in the island. He finds himself in the heart of fresh and tender English nature. Small rivulets flow through the gently undulating country. Wide meadows clothe the soft hollows in the valleys with abundant green. In grassy enclosures deer and roes are feeding; they push forwards inquisitively as the train passes. Fragrant linden trees rise dreamily in the suave, park-like landscape, through which the Stour winds along like a riband of silver. On the bank of this enchanting stream Thomas Gainsborough, the son of a simple clothier, was born. Reynolds' vocation had been brought about through the perusal of a book. In the scenery and the woods that were in the neighbourhood of his home, Gainsborough, who was so alive to all the beauty of nature, received the decisive impression of his life. Here he roamed as a boy, while he neglected his school lessons. "Tom will be hung some day," reflected his schoolmaster; "Tom will be a genius," thought his parents. He sketched the parks and castles of the neighbourhood. In his later life he used to say that there was no picturesque old tree trunk, no meadow or woodland glade or stream within a four-mile radius of Sudbury, that he did not retain a recollection of from his childish years. Like Constable, when he was an old man, he still thought with gratitude of his home, of all that beauty upon which he had looked, and which had made him a painter. Here, in the green woods and fresh pastures of his birthplace, he trained himself. At the age of ten he was a painter. [Illustration: REYNOLDS. MISS REYNOLDS.]