_Charles Robert Leslie_, known as an author by his pleasant book on Constable and a highly conservative _Handbook for Young Painters_, had a similar _repértoire_, and rendered in oils Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Molière, with more or less ability. The National Gallery has an exceedingly prosaic and colourless picture of his, "Sancho Panza in the Apartment of the Duchess." Some that are in the South Kensington Museum are better; for example, "The Taming of the Shrew," "The Dinner at Mr. Page's House" from _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, and "Sir Roger de Coverley." His finest and best-known work is "My Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman," which charmingly illustrates the pretty scene in _Tristram Shandy_: "'I protest, madam,' said my Uncle Toby, 'I can see nothing whatever in your eye.' 'It is not in the white!' said Mrs. Wadman. My Uncle Toby looked with might and main into the pupil." As in Newton's works, so in Leslie's too, there is such a strong dose of realism that his pictures will always keep their value as historical documents--not for the year 1630 but for 1830. As a colourist he was--in his later works at any rate--a delicate imitator of the Dutch _chiaroscuro_; and in the history of art he occupies a position similar to that of Diez in Germany, and was esteemed in the same way, even in later years, when the young Pre-Raphaelite school began its embittered war against "brown sauce"--the same war which a generation afterwards was waged in Germany by Liebermann and his followers against the school of Diez. [Illustration: MULREADY. FAIR TIME.] _Mulready_, thirty-two of whose pictures are preserved in the South Kensington Museum, is in his technique almost more delicate than Leslie, and he has learnt a great deal from Metsu. By preference he took his subjects out of Goldsmith. "Choosing the Wedding Gown" and "The Whistonian Controversy" would make pretty illustrations for an _édition de luxe_ of _The Vicar of Wakefield_. Otherwise he too had a taste for immortalising children, by turns lazy and industrious, at their tea or playing by the water's edge. From _Thomas Webster_, the fourth of these kindly, childlike masters, yet more inspiriting facts are to be obtained. He has informed the world that at a not very remote period of English history all the agricultural labourers were quite content with their lot. No one ever quarrelled with his landlord, or sat in a public-house and let his family starve. The highest bliss of these excellent people was to stay at home and play with their children by the light of a wax-candle. Webster's rustics, children, and schoolmasters are the citizens of an ideal planet, but the little country is a pleasant world. His pictures are so harmless in intention, so neat and accurate in drawing, and so clear and luminous in colour that they may be seen with pleasure even at the present day. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ FRITH. POVERTY AND WEALTH.]