[Illustration: HOLL. "THE LORD GAVE, THE LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY; BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE LORD." (_By permission of E. C. Pawle, Esq., the owner of the picture._)] Boughton is not the only painter of budding girlhood. All English literature has a tender feminine trait. Tennyson is the poet most widely read, and he has won all hearts chiefly through his portraits of women: Adeline, Eleänore, Lilian, and the May Queen--that delightful gallery of pure and noble figures. In English painting, too, it is seldom men who are represented, but more frequently women and children, especially little maidens in their fresh pure witchery. Belonging still to the older period there is _Philip H. Calderon_, an exceedingly fertile although lukewarm and academical artist, in whose blood is a good deal of effeminate Classicism. When his name appears in a catalogue it means that the spectator will be led into an artificial region peopled with pretty girls--beings who are neither sad nor gay, and who belong neither to the present nor to ancient times, to no age in particular and to no clime. Whenever such ethereal girlish figures wear the costume of the Directoire period, _Marcus Stone_ is their father. He is likewise one of the older men whose first appearance was made before the time of Walker. His young ladies part broken-hearted from a beloved suitor, turned away by their father, and save the honour of their family by giving their hand to a wealthy but unloved aspirant, or else they are solitary and lost in tender reveries. In his earliest period Marcus Stone had a preference for interiors; rich Directoire furniture and objects of art indicate with exactness the year in which the narrative takes place. Later, he took a delight in placing his _rococo_ ladies and gentlemen in the open air, upon the terraces of old gardens or in sheltered alleys. All his pictures are pretty, the faces, the figures, and the accessories; in relation to them one may use the adjective "pretty" in its positive, comparative, or superlative degree. In England Marcus Stone is the favourite painter of "sweethearts," and it cannot be easy to go so near the boundaries of candied _genre_ painting and yet always to preserve a certain _noblesse_. [Illustration: _L'Art._ HOLL. LEAVING HOME.]