The last of the group, _William Powell Frith_, was the most copious in giving posterity information about the manners and costumes of his contemporaries, and would be still more authentic if life had not seemed to him so genial and roseate. His pictures represent scenes of the nineteenth century, but they seem like events of the good old times. At that period people were undoubtedly good and innocent and happy. They had no income-tax and no vices and worries, and all went to heaven and felt in good spirits. And so they do in Frith's pictures, only not so naturally as in Ostade and Beham. For example, he goes on the beach at a fashionable English watering-place during the season, in July or August. The geniality which predominates here is quite extraordinary. Children are splashing in the sea, young ladies flirting, niggers playing the barrel-organ and women singing ballads to its strains; every one is doing his utmost to look well, and the pair of beggars who are there for the sake of contrast have long become resigned to their fate. In his racecourse pictures everything is brought together which on such occasions is representative of London life: all types, from the baronet to the ragman; all beauties, from the lady to the street-walker. A rustic has to lose his money, or a famished acrobat to turn his pockets inside out to assure himself that there is really nothing in them. His picture of the gaming-table in Homburg is almost richer in such examples of dry observation and humorous and spirited episode. [Illustration: MULREADY. CROSSING THE FORD.] This may serve to exemplify the failures of these painters of _genre_. Not light and colour, but anecdote, comedy, and genial tale-telling are the basis of their labours. And yet, notwithstanding this attempt to express literary ideas through the mediums of a totally different art, their work is significant. While continental artists avoided nothing so much as that which might seem to approach nature, the English, revolting from the thraldom of theory, gathered subjects for their pictures from actual life. These men, indeed, pointed out the way to painters from every country; and they, once on the right road, were bound ultimately to arrive at the point from which they no longer looked on life through the glasses of the anecdotist, but saw it with the eye of the true artist. CHAPTER XVIII THE MILITARY PICTURE