[Illustration: _Scribner._ ALBERT MOORE. READING ALOUD. (_By permission of W. Connal, Esq., the owner of the picture._)] Two masters who died young and have a peculiarly captivating individuality, George Mason and Fred Walker, stand at the head of this, the most novel phase of English painting. Alike in the misfortune of premature death, they are also united by a bond of sympathy in their taste and sentiment. If there be truth in what Théophile Gautier once said in a beautiful poem, "_Tout passe, l'art robuste seul a l'éternité_," neither of them will enter the kingdom of immortality. That might be applied to them which Heine said of Leopold Robert: they have purified the peasant in the purgatory of their art, so that nothing but a glorified body remains. As the pre-Raphaelites wished to give exquisite precision to the world of dream, Walker and Mason have taken this precision from the world of reality, endowing it with a refined subtlety which in truth it does not possess. Their pictures breathe only of the bloom and essence of things, and in them nature is deprived of her strength and marrow, and painting of her peculiar qualities, which are changed into coloured breath and tinted dream. They may be reproached with an excess of nervous sensibility, an effort after style by which modern truth is recast, a morbid tendency towards suave mysticism. Nevertheless their works are the most original products of English painting during the last thirty years, and by a strange union of realism and poetic feeling they have exercised a deeply penetrative influence upon Continental art.