[Illustration: REYNOLDS. DR. BURNEY.] The passage from Hogarth to Gainsborough marks a chapter in the history of English culture. Hogarth is the embodiment of John Bull; you can hear him growl, like some savage bull-dog. That brutal, indecorous robustness of England's aggressive youth becomes, in Gainsborough's hands, agreeable, refined, gentle, and seductive. Reynolds, with his robustness as of the old masters, might be best compared with Tintoretto; Gainsborough, in his quite modern and fantastic elegance, is a more tender, subtle, and mysterious spirit, poet and magician at once, like Watteau. There one listened to the full, swelling chords of the organ; here to the soft, dulcet, silvery notes of the violin. Reynolds loved warm, brown and red tones; Gainsborough essayed for the first time, in a series of his happiest creations, that scale of colour, coldly green and blue, in which to-day the majority of English pictures are still painted. Everything with him is soft and clear; the tone of those blue or light yellow silks, which he loved especially, is that of the most transparent enamel; the background fades away into dreamy vapour, the figures are surrounded with an atmosphere of seduction. What a masterpiece he has created in the "Blue Boy," his most popular and most individual picture. One can describe every piece of the clothing, but it is impossible to reproduce the harmony of the painting, the rich, pure blue of the costume, which stands out against a lustrous, brown background of landscape. How the stately youth stands, noble from head to foot, in the brown and green autumn landscape, with its canopy of sky! Master Bootall was by far the most elegant portrait painted in England since Van Dyck, and withal of a nervosity quite new. See that youthful pride in the gaze, that mobile sensibility in the pose! [Illustration: THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH.]