There was found beside his body a paper on which he had written: "God forgive me. Amen. Finis," with the quotation from Shakespeare's _Lear_: "Stretch me no longer on the rack of this rough world." All these masters are more interesting for their human qualities than for their works, which, with their extravagant colour, forced gestures, and follies of every description, contain no new thing worthy of further development. Even when they sought to make direct copies from Continental performances, they did not attain the graceful sweep of their models. The refinements which they imitated became clumsy and awkward in their hands, and they remained half _bourgeois_ and half barbaric. The liberating influence of English art was not found in the province of the great painting, and it is probably not without significance that the few who tried to import it came to grief in the experiment. There can be no doubt that such art goes more against the grain of the English nature than of any other. Even in the days of scholastic philosophy the English asserted the doctrine that there are only individuals in nature. In the beginning of modern times a new era, grounded on the observation of nature, was promulgated from England. Bacon had little to say about beauty: he writes against the proportions and the principle of selection in art, and therefore against the ideal. Handsome men, he says, have seldom possessed great qualities. And in the same way the English stage had just as little bent for the august and rhythmical grandeur of classical literature. When he stabbed Polonius, Garrick never dreamed of moving according to the taste of Boileau, and was probably as different from the Greek leader of a chorus as Hogarth from David. The peculiar merits of English literature and science have been rooted from the time of their first existence in their capacity for observation. This explains the contempt for regularity in Shakespeare, the feeling for concrete fact in Bacon. English philosophy is positive, exact, utilitarian, and highly moral. Hobbes and Locke, John Stuart Mill and Buckle, in England take the place of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant upon the Continent. Amongst English historians Carlyle is the only poet: all the rest are learned prose-writers who collect observations, combine experiences, arrange dates, weigh possibilities, reconcile facts, discover laws, and hoard and increase positive knowledge. The eighteenth century had seen the rise of the novel as the picture of contemporary life; in Hogarth this national spirit was first turned to account in painting. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, again, the good qualities of English art consisted not in bold ideality, but in sharpness of observation, sobriety, and flexibility of spirit. [Illustration: GEORGE ROMNEY.]