"_Æquam semper in rebus arduis servare mentem_" might be chosen as a motto for _George Mason's_ biography. Brought up in prosperous circumstances, he first became a doctor, but when he was seven-and-twenty he went to Italy to devote himself to painting; here he received the news that he was ruined. His father had lost everything, and he found himself entirely deprived of means, so that his life became a long struggle against hunger. He bound himself to dealers, and provided animal pieces by the dozen for the smallest sums. In a freezing room he sat with his pockets empty, worked until it was dark, and crept into bed when Rome went to feast. After two years, however, he had at last saved the money necessary for taking him back to England, and he settled with his young wife in Wetley Abbey. This little village, where he lived his simple life in the deepest seclusion, became for him what Barbizon had been for Millet. He wandered by himself amongst the fields, and painted the valleys of Wetley with the tenderness of feeling with which Corot painted the outskirts of Fontainebleau. He saw the ghostly mists lying upon the moors, saw the peasants returning from the plough and the reapers from the field, noted the children, in their life so closely connected with the change of nature. And yet his peasant pictures more resemble the works of Perugino than those of Bastien-Lepage. The character of their landscape is to some extent responsible for this. For the region he paints, in its lyrical charm, has kinship with the hills in the pictures of Perugino. Here there grow the same slender trees upon a delicate, undulating soil. But the silent, peaceful, and resigned human beings who move across it have also the tender melancholy of Umbrian Madonnas. Mason's realism is merely specious; it consists in the external point of costume. There are really no peasants of such slender growth, no English village maidens with such rosy faces and such coquettish Holland caps. Mason divests them of all the heaviness of earth, takes, as it were, only the flower-dust from reality. The poetic grace of Jules Breton might be recalled, were it not that Mason works with more refinement and subtlety, for his idealism was unconscious, and never resulted in an empty, professional painting of beauty. [Illustration: _Brothers, photo._ CALDECOTT. THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME. (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture._)]