with his dear little wife, completed no treatises or discourses on his art, but made sketches or sometimes music. Reynolds was a scholar-painter, Gainsborough a painter-musician. It was said of him that he painted portraits for money and landscapes for amusement, but that he made music because he needs must. He collected musical instruments as Reynolds did a library. Even in his pictures he gives his people, for preference, violins in their hands. To the Musical Club which he had founded in Ipswich he remained faithful all his life, and in that neighbourhood, or in Richmond or Hampstead, he spent the summer every year. Here amidst that green nature it was also his wish to be buried. His funeral was a very quiet one. In the peaceful graveyard at Kew, Thomas Gainsborough sleeps tranquilly under the shady willows, far from the noise and tumult of the great city. Sir Joshua said at his grave: "Should England ever become so fruitful in talent that we can venture to speak of an English school, then will Gainsborough's name be handed down to posterity as one of the first." Yes, one might say to-day, as the first of all. [Illustration: REYNOLDS. EDMUND BURKE.] [Illustration: REYNOLDS. MRS. ABINGTON.] Joshua Reynolds is certainly a great painter, and deserves the high veneration in which his compatriots hold him. It is not without a certain awe that, in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy, one can look upon the armchair that he used during his sittings, upon which all who were famous in eighteenth-century England have sat. Reynolds is one of the greatest English portrait painters, and, resembling most the classical masters, showed in the highest degree the qualities we admire in them. His colouring is of an amazing softness, depth, and strength; his _chiaroscuro_ is warm and vaporous. There are portraits by him which, in the subtlety of their tone, resemble the best of Rembrandt's; others, whose noble colouring approaches the _chef-d'oeuvres_ of Van Dyck. Master of the whole mechanism of the human body, he possessed in the highest degree the rare art of setting persons surely and unconstrainedly on their feet. His portraits are pictures; one needs no whit to be acquainted with the persons they represent; they satisfy as works of art in themselves, and as psychological studies by a man who had the capacity of sounding the depths of the human heart. The complete catalogue of all those who sat for Sir Joshua during the space of half a century forms an uninterrupted commentary on the contemporary history of England. [Illustration: REYNOLDS. EDMUND MALONE.]