But yet another and still wider province was opened to continental nations by the art of England. In an epoch of archæological resuscitations and romantic regrets for the past, it brought French and German painters to a consciousness that the man of the nineteenth century in his daily life might be a perfectly legitimate subject for art. Engravings after the best pictures of Wilkie hang round the walls of Louis Knaus's reception-room in Berlin. And that in itself betrays to us a fragment of the history of art. The painters who saw the English people with the eyes of Walter Scott, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Dickens were a generation in advance of those who depicted the German people in the spirit of Immermann, Auerbach, Gustav Freytag, and Fritz Reuter. The English advanced quietly on the road trodden by Hogarth in the eighteenth century, whilst upon the Continent the nineteenth century had almost completed half its course before art left anything which will allow future generations to see the men of the period as they really were. Since the days of Fielding and Goldsmith the novel of manners had been continually growing. Burns, the poet of the plough, and Wordsworth, the singer of rustic folk, had given a vogue to that poetry of peasant life and those village tales which have since gone the round of all Europe. England began at that time to become the richest country in the world, and great fortunes were made. Painters were thus obliged to provide for the needs of a new and wealthy middle class. This fact gives us the explanation both of the merits and the faults which are characteristic of English _genre_ painting. [Illustration: LANDSEER. LOW LIFE.]