colour to represent the multifarious forms of human activity: the phases and conditions of life, fashion as well as misery, work and pleasure, the drawing-room and the street, the teeming activity of towns and the quiet labour of peasants. The essential thing was to write the entire natural history of the age. And this way, the way from museums to nature, and from the past to the world of living men, was shown by the English to the French and German painters. [Illustration: _Mansell Photo._ ROMNEY. SERENA.] CHAPTER XVII ENGLISH PAINTING TO 1850 "The English school has an advantage over others in being young: its tradition is barely a century old, and, unlike the Continental schools, it is not hampered by antiquated Greek and Latin theories. What fortunate conditions it has for breaking away into really modern work! whereas in other nations the weight of tradition presses hard on the boldest innovators. The English do not look back; on the contrary, they look into life around them." So wrote Burger-Thoré in one of his Salons in 1867. Yet England was not unaffected by the retrospective tendency on the Continent. Perhaps it might even be demonstrated that this movement had its earliest origin on British soil. England had its "Empire style" in architecture fifty years before there was any empire in France; it had its Classical painting when David worked at Cupids with Boucher, and it gave the world a Romanticist at the very time when the literature of the Continent became "Classical." _The Lady of the Lake_, _Marmion_, _The Lord of the Isles_, _The Fair Maid of Perth_, _Old Mortality_, _Ivanhoe_, _Quentin Durward_, who is there that does not know these names by heart? We have learnt history from Walter Scott, and that programme of the artistic crafts which Lorenz Gedon drew up in 1876, when he arranged the department _Works of our Fathers_ in the Munich Exhibition, had been carried out by Scott as early as 1816. For Scott laid out much of the money he received for his romances in building himself a castle in the style of the baronial strongholds of the Middle Ages: "Towers and turrets all imitated from a royal building in Scotland, windows and gables painted with the arms of the clans, with lions couchant," rooms "filled with high sideboards and carved chests, targes, plaids, Highland broadswords, halberts, and suits of armour, and adorned with antlers hung up as trophies." Here was a Makartesque studio very many years before Makart.