And even when, once in a way, a more gloomy trait appears in his pictures, it is there only that the light may shine the more brightly. The poor old flute-player who sits homeless upon a bench near the house is placed there merely to show how well off are the children who are hurrying merrily home after school. His picture of 1890, indeed, treated a scene of shipwreck, but a passage from a poet stood beneath; there was not a lost sailor to be seen, and all the tenderness of the artist is devoted to the pretty children and the young women gazing with anxiety and compassion across the sea. _Frank Holl_ was in the habit of giving his pictures a more lachrymose touch, together with a more sombre and ascetic harmony of colour. He borrowed his subjects from the life of the humble classes, always searching, moreover, for melancholy features; he took delight in representing human virtue in misfortune, and for the sake of greater effect he frequently chose a verse from the Bible as the title. Thus the work with which he first won the English public was a picture exhibited in 1869: "The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." A family of five brothers and sisters, who have just lost their mother, are assembled round the breakfast-table in a poorly furnished room. One sister is crying, another is sadly looking straight before her, whilst a third is praying with folded hands. The younger brother, a sailor, has just reached home from a voyage, to close his dying mother's eyes, and the eldest of all, a young and earnest curate, is endeavouring to console his brothers and sisters with the words of Job. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ SANT. THE MUSIC LESSON. (_By permission of the Artist._)] The next picture, exhibited in 1871, he called "No Tidings from the Sea," and represented in it a fisherman's family--grandmother, mother, and child--who in a cheerless room are anxiously expecting the return of a sailor. "Leaving Home" showed four people sitting on a bench outside a waiting-room at a railway station. To awaken the spectator's pity "Third Class" is written in large letters upon the window just above their heads. The principal figure is a lady dressed in black, who is counting, in a somewhat obtrusive manner, the little money which she still has left.