It was a remarkable chance which ordained that Thomas Gainsborough, the first man who as a painter depicted the gracious charms of the country of his birth, the comeliness of its expanses of deep green lush meadows, the strength of the lofty, wide-spreading trees, as seen with the eyes of a lover, should be born in the spring of the same year in which Thomson's _Spring_ appeared. That he knew and admired Thomson is proved by his dedication to him of that delightful "Musidora" in the National Gallery, a lovely woman bathing her feet in some shady forest pool. It is said that he only sent half a dozen landscapes to the Academy during the eighteen years that he exhibited there. On the other hand, they hung in his house in Pall Mall in long rows on the walls of his studio. After his death his widow held a sale, at which fifty-six landscapes were sold. Gainsborough must be accounted one of the moderns, so naïve and intimate is the impression which his pictures produce. He, who passed his whole youth in the idyllic loveliness of the woods, was fitted to be the delineator of that mellow English nature. He understood the murmur of the brooks and the sighing of the winds. Like his own life, so regular and peaceful, gently swaying as though to the friendly elements, are the trees in his pictures, with their peaceful tranquillity; no storm disturbs the calm of a Gainsborough picture. His was a contented, harmonious spirit, like Corot's. His landscapes know no tempestuous grandeur; they are a playground for children, a place for shepherds to rest. "The calm of mid day, the haze of twilight, the dew and the pearls of morning," said Constable, "are what we find in the pictures of this good, kindly, happy man.... As we look at them the tears spring to our eyes, and we know not whence they come. The solitary shepherd with his flock, the peasant returning from the wood with his bundle of faggots, whispering woods and open dales, sweet little peasant children with their pitchers in springtime,--that is what he loved to paint and what he painted, with as much sought-out refinement as with tender truth to nature." His landscapes are like windows opening on the country, not compositions, but pieces taken straight out of that fruitful English nature. Every year he used to return to his green pastures, and paint very early, when the sun rose. Before him rose a cluster of trees, all round the farm the flocks were grazing, thousands of busy bees flew buzzing from flower to flower; goats, with their kids, were feeding in the meadows, wild doves cooed, and the birds in the wood sang their praises to the Creator. Thus do the landscapes of Gainsborough affect us. They are soft and tender as some sweet melody in their discreet intimacy, without colorist effects, as wonderfully harmonious as nature herself. A thatched cot, that peeps timidly from between the great trees, a silvery dale shut in by weeping willows, a