The young master, who died at twenty-seven, _Richard Parkes Bonington_, unites these English classic masters with the French. An Englishman by birth and origin, but trained as a painter in France, where he had gone when fifteen years of age, he seems from many points of view one of the most gracious products of the Romantic movement in France, though at the same time he has qualities over which only the English had command at that period, and not the French. He entered Gros's studio in France, which was then the favourite meeting-place of all the younger men of revolutionary tendencies, but repeated journeys to London did not allow him to forget Constable. In Normandy and Picardy he painted his first landscapes, following them up with a series of Venetian sea-pieces and little historical scenes. Then consumption seized him and took but a brief time in striking him down. On 23rd September 1828 he died in London, whither he had gone to consult a specialist. In consequence of his early death his talent never ripened, but he was a simple, natural, pure, and congenial artist for all that. "I knew him well and loved him much. His English composure, which nothing could disturb, robbed him of none of the qualities which make life pleasant. When I first came across him I was myself very young, and was making studies in the Louvre. It was about 1816 or 1817. He was in the act of copying a Flemish landscape--a tall youth who had grown rapidly. He had already an astonishing dexterity in water-colours, which were then an English novelty. Some which I saw later at a dealer's were charming, both in colour and composition. Other modern artists are perhaps more powerful and more accurate than Bonington, but no one in this modern school, perhaps no earlier artist, possessed the ease of execution which makes his works, in a certain sense, diamonds by which the eye is pleased and fascinated, quite independently of the subject and the particular representation of nature. And the same is true of the costume pictures which he painted later. Even here I could never grow weary of marvelling at his sense of effect, and his great ease of execution. Not that he was quickly satisfied; on the contrary, he often began over again perfectly finished pieces which seemed wonderful to us. But his dexterity was so great that in a moment he produced with his brush new effects, which were as charming as the first." With these words his friend and comrade, the great Eugène Delacroix, drew the portrait of Bonington. Bonington was at once the most natural and the most delicate in that Romantic school in which he was one of the first to make an appearance. He had a fine eye for the charm of nature, saw grace and beauty in her everywhere, and represented the spring and the sunshine in bright and clear tones. No Frenchman before him has so painted the play of light on gleaming costumes and succulent meadow grasses. Even his lithographs